VPC Active Standby roles

[komalthecoolk]

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before but I understand that there is an election process and Active and Standby roles are elected among the device pair in a VPC. I believe that one of the reasons for having these roles is so that in case of a peer-link failure, the standby is the one that has to shut down it's VPC port-channels to avoid  traffic issues but are there other reasons as well? I also think that the active device is the only one "talking" in the STP running on the VPC but I'm not sure about that.

It would be great if someone can consolidate all the responsibilities of the active and/or standby deivce in a VPC pair!

[Jon Marshall]

Have a look at this document where the vPC role is covered in terms of what it does (page 17 onwards) - 

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/design/vpc_design/vpc_best_practices_design_guide.pdf

it is worth reading the entire document because some of the behaviour can change eg. STP BPDUs and how they are processed can be modified by using vPC peer-switch.

Jon

[komalthecoolk]

That document actually clears a few other doubts as well! Thanks a lot Jon!