Thursday, December 19, 2013

Best practices /Troubleshooting MST/PVST interaction

Recommendation/ Best Practices/Design recommendation.


    1.    Use Rapid PVST instead PVST on all the switches to make spaning-tree convergence faster.
    2.    Make Core switch as spaning-tree  root bridge by making highest spanning-tree priority on
           switch  since core switch connects to all distribution.
    3.    To prevent other switch to become spanning-tree root bridge, always  apply spanning-tree  
           root  guard on all downstream links connecting to distribution switch.
    4.    Enable spanning-tree portfast bpduguard  on all the  port on access switches.
    5.    Etherchannel misconfig guard has already been enabled.
    6.    Root bridge  for all VLANS should be in MST region when interacting with PVST+/RPVST+
           boundary.



Commands to use while troubleshooting.

Show spanning-tree mst details.
Clear spanning-tree counters
show spanning-tree mst configuration.
Show spanning-tree details | i BPDU|from|exec|ieee|last



Facts :

1) MST runs MST0 (one instance for all  VLANS even when there is no VLAN mapped to MST0 instance) for interacting with PVST+/RPVST switches.
2) PVST+/RPVST+ switches always follow the priority of MST0 instance and its properties.
3) MST0 (Commom spanning tree or CIST root bridge) informed other MST 1 or another MST instance about the TCN changes received from PVST+/RPVST+ switches.
4) PVST+/RPVST+ switches sees entire MST region as one PVST /RPSVT switch bridge.
5) If MST instance is not configured correctly , it sees as RSTP boundary ports.
6) During testing, it is found that native vlan not used for MST BPDU- still  have doubt on it.
7) In PVST , whenever TCN generates  by switch, it informs the neigbor switch towards the ROOT bridge and neigbor switch ackwnowledge the TCN BPDU to switch to make him stop the BPDU. Same process goes up to the root bridge and then root bridge starts sending the TCN BPDU to inform all the switch to reduce the aging timer to forward timer and flush the mac address table.
8) In contrast to PVST, RSTP behaved differently in TCN. Whenever TCN is generated in RPVST, it flush the mac address table and inform other switches at the same.




No comments:

Post a Comment