mLACP deployment question

[s-daly]

I'm building out a new office LAN of about 600 people, and I'm using a pair of C9500's for my core switches. My plan is to run some sort of mutlichassis etherchannel solution for redundant/HA uplinks to my floor switches.

I'm unsure if the C9500's support VSS; even so, my preference would be to run the 2 core switches as 2 separate systems running autonomously, so no VSS or virtual stacking of these switches.

Given the catalyst line doesn't support vPC (still?), it appears that my only option left is mLACP (if I'm incorrect, I'm all ears). I've never worked with mLACP before, and in doing some initial research I'm a little surprised how little information is available on-line. Further, the couple of Cisco docs I found are (for lack of a better term) convoluted at best, as they also talk about MPLS pseudo-wire integration with mLACP, but I'm not interested in doing any MPLS deployment or integration in this scenario.

That said, has anyone deplyed mLACP on the 9K switches on a production network before? Was your experience a positive one? Are there configuration resources available that I'm just not aware of?

[balaji.bandi]

I'm building out a new office LAN of about 600 people, and I'm using a pair of C9500's for my core switches. My plan is to run some sort of mutlichassis etherchannel solution for redundant/HA uplinks to my floor switches.

one of my deployment have similar kind of setup, each core switch individual not VSS.(can be done with  VSS also - depends on requirement)

Access switch up links connected to each one separately to each core switch and we run OSPF, it it automatically fail over when one link fails.

is this something you looking to deploy ?

[franky.leung@jos.com.hk]

 Cat 9500 core switch and we run OSPF, it it automatically fail over when one link fails. So running active-active HA on Cat 9500 over un OSPF? 

[s-daly]

I talked with my SE about this, and here's the info I received:

Cat 9K's do not do VSS, but they do virtual stackwise instead:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst9500/software/release/16-6/configuration_guide/b_166_ha_9500/b_166_ha_9500_chapter_01.pdf

In this situation, the redundant core switches run as a single logical switch stack on a single control plane, so port channels can be setup on two physically separate switches as a single logical port aggregate in a single virtual switch configuration.

That said, if we prefer to run our core switches with autonomous control planes, the 9K's also have native mLACP functionality, but this functionality doesn't appear to be well-documented, or widely adopted, so I'm staying away from it for the time-being.