Foundry TurboIron switch to MLXe-8 switch via trunking

[aurfalien]

Hello,

I was curious what the best way to configure trunking between a Foundry Turbo Iron (I sure miss those old names) switch and a Brocade MLXe switch.

In the past, trunking between Foundry switches meant using the trunk commands to do so.  And it's simply running for example;

trunk ethernet 1 to 2

trunk deploy

However in my case, should I use the link-aggregate (802.3ad) commands on the TurboIron and lag commands on the MLXe?  I'm leaning towards the latter as both are 802.3ad?  And should both be  dynamic?

BTW the TurboIron has 24x 10Gb and 4x1Gb.  A great little switch.

I forgot to add that this is being done purely for throughput and will carry VLAN info.

[JoergKo]

Hi, a working configuration on TIX24 looks like this:

interface ethernet 3
link-aggregate configure key 40046
link-aggregate active
!
interface ethernet 4
link-aggregate configure key 40046
link-aggregate active

This aggregates both e3 and e4 interfaces into 802.3ad, which then also works on the MLX in the opposite direction (lag commands), followed by a "trunk deploy" from the configuration mode. However... the TIX24 is a bit tricky; it can happen that the device flaps during deployment, etc.  Also, make sure beforehand that you have configured the correct VLANs in the interfaces.  It's better to use OOB Management for all that configuration ... and also that device is really old, and I wouldn't use it for new networks anymore.

BR

[JamesOverbeck]

Hello. I started with Foundry in 2004, moved to Brocade in 2009, so I'm familiar with that good old product naming scheme. Checking my local stash of manuals, unfortunately I no longer have manuals from that era, and unfortunately it's not the sort of resource Extreme would have around. Stackable switch products all went with the old parts of Brocade that were not purchased by Extreme from Broadcom. Ideally you should probably be checking with Comscope who purchased Arris who'd purchased the Ruckus/ICX/TurboIron parts of Brocade. Whether they'd still hold that information is a whole other matter, but historically at least, all Ruckus/ICX/TurboIron products belong to Comscope.

That all said, I've found that for any old product, if you Google around you can usually find someone who's posted old PDFs. As such Googling for fastiron-turboiron-04200-configguide.pdf should get you what you need. Peeking at that now, what you wrote should be enough to get a static LAG working with MLX. No guarantees unfortunately since it's not a product Extreme has ever supported. Creating LACP dynamic on TurboIron seems to require adding commands beginning with "link-aggregate" on the individual physical ports. Extreme doesn't have any products that use the exact same command grammar, so no guarantees, but skimming the PDF, it looks like "link-aggregate active" would be the bare minimum necessary on each physical port.

If that doesn't work, unfortunately the next best suggestions I could make would be to look for that PDF or talk to Comscope about TurboIron support.

[aurfalien]

Thanks James.  I do have all those manuals as well as firmware so all good.  I'll trial and error but being offsite/remote will make it a challenge.  Will have hands on site for this.