EXOS: mLAG vlan consistency check

[M_Nees]

currently we use very often MultiSwitch LAGs (mLAG). It works well and offers a very good flexibility. But it is very error-prone to keep all the vlan consistent (equal) over the 2 switch and the isc manually by the admin. It needs a lot of time to check that really all vlan are configured correctly. If there is one vlan missed there is no error message or advice that will show the mistake. And also the resulting connectivity problems are very strange. So it is fundamental that vlan configs are equal in mLAG environments!

Other vendors will help the network admins with some checks that will generate an error if something is missed:

What do you think ? Someone who agree with my need ? Is it imaginable that EXOS will so that (in the future) ?

i am very pleased for some discussion!

[Kevin_Kim]

I think the benefits from running STP over MLAG are to detect and prevent a super loop formed down on access switches uplinked to different MLAG ports. And, the access switches running with STP could have MLAG peer switches as root bridge.

[cbuchenau]

And why would you want to do that? One nice thing about MLAG is that it helps you to eliminate Spanning Tree in your Network 🙂

By the way - if you have spanning tree enabled on other ports or switches inside the network, BPDUs are still being forwarded, including through MLAG ports, as EXOS sees and handles it as normal L2 Multicast traffic. Maybe that helps?

[BradP]

Hi Matthias,

Have you see the script on Github? I think that this is what you are looking for. Can you confirm? https://github.com/extremenetworks/ExtremeScripting/tree/master/EXOS/Python/mlag_config_check

[BrandonC]

I just want to point out one limitation of this script. It doesn't compare the VLANs across the peers.

So it will ensure that peer A has all the VLANs on its MLAG ports on the ISC, and the peer B has all the VLANs on its MLAG ports on the ISC. However, it doesn't check to see if both MLAG peers have the same VLAN config on MLAG ports.