How to connect the Management Port to the network

[Alex_Joda]

We always thought that the Management Port of the Summit Switches are totally independent from the switch ports, with an own VLAN and own Router interface. Because of this we choose the Management Port to connect the switches permanently to the central network for example to monitor them with RidgeLine and to configure the uplinks.
If we connect the Management Port to the same switch to where the Uplink goes the Management Port becomes unstable with periodic disconnects until the a warm restart of the switch. This behaves a little like a loop although the Management Port should behave like a second independent switch. Can somebody explain that ?

[Bill_Stritzinge]

You are correct in saying that the management port is independent of the vr-default, but the condition you are experiencing is due to the fact the switch has a single mac address. The condition you are experiencing is not a L2 loop in the true sense but because you are connecting them to the same switch,with the same mac address, you then loose connectivity. In the true sense of "out of band", the two networks would never touch one another. Let me know if that is clear or you need more information.

[Alex_Joda]

Hi Bill,

today we changed our management to inband and gave the default network an IP-address. At the moment we have done that the the management port was only partly available and even the new inband IP was not stable. This stops only after we removed the cable from the management port.

In this case the the management port was not directly linked to the same switch as the uplink ! It was only in the same network through another switch in between. The the problem with the same mac address seems to exist even if the switches are not connected directly....So we are very careful now using this management port. It looks like you can use them only if the networks are totally separated.

The only problem now is that we are not able to configure the uplinks of the switches any more without connecting directly with a notebook to the local switch itself. This is very annoying on a big campus or if you only have remote access to the site. Do you have a solution for that ?

[Alex_Joda]

Hi Bill,

that sounds like a good reason for this ! So if we are not using the same switch that we uplinking to it should not give us any problems...If there is only one additional switch we might use the inband VLAN to manage it....Thanks a lot for the help !

Alex