rstp using 4507

[marcusbrutus]

Hi. I just wish to ask given the scenario where you have two 4507 switches with two ethernet connections for redundancy, with rstp running, would both links be active and exchange packets or would only one physical connection be active? If only one connection is active, is it possible to enable some sort of load sharing on both ethernet connections between the switches?

Thanks in advance.

[Istvan_Rabai]

Hi Marcusbrutus,

You can configure load balancing by setting the RSTP parameters so it converges differently for different vlans.

This way the spanning tree will block one port for vlan1 and another port for vlan2, etc.

So you will direct vlan1 traffic on one port, vlan2 traffic on another port and load balance the different vlan traffics.

Without the above, for load sharing between the ethernet connections I would suggest to use Etherchannel.

If you provide details, we can help you in how to configure the switches specifically.

Cheers:

Istvan

[marcusbrutus]

Hi Istvan,

Thank you for your prompt reply. From your reply, did i understand it correctly that even if there is load balancing active on both etherchannels, if one etherchannel fails, the other channel would still be able to route all the packets?

Thanks.

[Istvan_Rabai]

Yes, if one link in the Etherchannel fails then the rest of the links (or the one remaining link) will take over for it.

Cheers:

Istvan