Tom Sightler wrote :

> On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 16:19 +0100, Matthias Saou wrote:
> > If not, then the idea I had was the following : With 3 or more physical
> > network ports, keep one just for "maintenance" (IPMI/DRAC and PXE boot)
> > and bond the others with LACP, then trunk the two VLANs for private and
> > public LANs on top of that. Sounds possible? (as I've never used VLANs
> > on Linux, even less on top of some bonding!)
> 
> You can certainly do this part, although it could be argued, probably
> correctly, that VLAN's are not a strong enough security barrier on which
> to mix a "Public" and "Private" network, although those terms can mean
> slightly different things to different people.  We actually do this in a
> few cases, but the "public" VLAN is already firewalled and restricted by
> application layer proxies before it's VLAN's are mixed on the same
> wire/network infrastructure with our "public" VLAN's.

Thanks for confirming. I'll do some bonding+VLAN testing anyway.

> > This last setup would possibly mean loosing access to the "maintenance"
> > interface if a switch dies, but never loosing access to any of the two
> > production networks. The switches I have in mind are Cisco 4948, which
> > would be stacked together, and always have LACP configured across two
> > or more devices.
> 
> > Has anyone done anything similar? Sounds reasonable? Any advice?
> 
> We have a similar setup with Cisco 3750's in a stack (well, as far as
> VLAN's and redundant access), however, I don't think that an LACP
> channel bonded link can span across two different switches on a Cisco
> 4948.  This works on the 3750's because they stack via a special cable
> in the back and basically become a single switch, however I think that
> Cisco 4948's stack via trunk ports and still act as separate switches,
> with separate configs and switching engines, although I'd have to look
> it up to be 100% sure.  That doesn't mean you can't used use adaptive
> load balancing or simple failover across two switches (we do a good bit
> of this as well), but LACP is designed to make the links appear as a
> single link and typically can't span switches that don't share the same
> switching fabric.  That means it usually requires chassis based switches
> or stackable switches that become a single fabric via a fabric cable
> rather than connecting via ethernet trunks.
> 
> I could be wrong on the 4948 and it's capabilities, we have a couple of
> these and I'm pulling it from my memory.  I know it supports LACP on
> multiple ports within a single switch, but I'm pretty sure it cannot be
> LACP aware across multiple switches like the 3750's.

I thought the 4948's would have stacking capabilities similar to the
3750, but I must be wrong. I was mostly interested in those because they
can have redundant power supplies and cooling, but if I can install the
switches in a way that any of them can fail without affecting the
services, then it wouldn't be such a vital feature anymore, and I could
go with some 3750's, since they are very similar from what I can see
(i.e. there are also some with 10G X2 slots, which is what I'm after).

Thanks for the Cisco device insight! ;-)

Matthias

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