MISTP and RPVST

[austin0824]

Hi All,

What is the difference between MISTP and RPVST. I was asked this in an interview and I could not explain.

Cheers

Adojay

[Jon Marshall]

The main difference is that RPVST runs an instance of STP for each vlan. MISTP or MST groups vlans together and runs an instance of STP for each group.

MST is very useful if you have a large number of vlans or if you exceed the number of STP instances that a switch supports.

Jon

[Peter Paluch]

Hello Adojay,

In addition to Jon's perfect response, I would like to add that the MISTP and MSTP are two different protocols. In particular, the MISTP was a "grandfather" of the modern MSTP, created by Cisco, and was a proprietary protocol. MSTP borrows several ideas from the MISTP, however, they are not compatible and the MISTP is not actually used anywhere to my best knowledge. The MSTP, on the other hand, is widely supported even though it is, sadly, not deployed as often as it could.

Best regards,

Peter