Non-dual homed devices in a Cisco VSS

[uwbitservices]

I know it is best practice to dual-home all devices in a VSS setup but what if we don't want to do this with all our devices? All our Cisco distribution switches will be dual homed to the VSS pair when we perform an upgrade in a couple of weeks.

Currently we have two Dell Force10 switches in the Data Center connected to each other with VLT (Dells version of vPC) with an L3 uplink to our single 6500 Core switch. All our servers have dual-home connections to both Force10 switches using LACP. We don't want to make any changes to the Force10 switches so when we replace the single 6500 with dual 6800 in VSS we want to keep the setup similar. So one of the Force10 switches will have an L3 link to one 6800 chassis and the other Force10 switch will have an L3 link to the other 6800 chassis. And remember both Force10 switches are connected together. So there seems to be enough resiliency.

Will this work?

[Reza Sharifi]

It should work fine. You are connecting each Force10 to one of the 6800 using layer-3 and the Force10s are connected together.  So, if there is failure on one of the Force10 or the 6800 you have alternate path to the network.

HTH

[uwbitservices]

After thinking about this further I agree with you. Although I do have some concerns about this kind of design. If one of the Force10's goes down, won't half the end-users traffic potentially go over the VSL links?