XOS Fabric Attached

[Andre_Brits_Kan]

Hi Community

I recently started playing with the Extreme Fabric Connect (Old Avaya Fabric) and some Fabric Attached XOS switches and 39xx AP's.

I have two questions/comments that I thought would be good to share here and get some feedback.

1. When I connect a default XOS (X440-g2) switch to the Fabric (Via a FA port configured on the VSP fabric swithces) I expected the management vlan and all other fabric related info, to be pushed the the XOS switch from the fabric via LLDP. This would be a typical ZTP deployment scenario.
The problem I have is with the latest version of XOS (22.4.1.4) , LLDP is not enabled by default.
The FA management vlan and all other settings is only pushed to the XOS switch once I run the "Enble LLDP ports all" command.
Comment: LLDP should be enabled by default when you unpack a new switch.

2. On the Fabric Attached XOS switch I create a vlan and map an I-SID to the vlan. This mapping is then advertised via LLDP to the Fabric and learnt accordingly.
Why can I not map a i-sid to a VMAN? surely mapping a I-Sid to a vlan should be the same as mapping it to a VMAN. A typical scenario would be if I have various tenants on a network and each tenant was a Voice,Video and Data vlan. I would like to map the tenant a single port on a XOS switch, that is mapped to a VMAN, and what ever traffic is ingressing on this port should arrive on the remote side of the fabric and egressed. (Similar to how I would map a VMAN to a VPLS service across a MPLS network).
If this client connected directly to the Fabric connect switch I would be able to Map the interface to a I-Sid (isid 1234 elan-transparent port x/x) and that would work fine, but what if I had a XOS fabric attached switch between client and Fabric?

Looking forward to some comments on Fabric 

[Ludovico_Steven]

There is a simple overview in the doc "Configuring Fabric Basics and Layer 2
Services on VSP Operating System Software"

But essentially FA gives you these benefits:
- Ability to connect an FA Client device (e.g. ExtremeWireless AP) to the XOS switch, and not needing to configure any VLANs for it; not only onboarding the AP, but when the AP gets configured for new SSIDs the AP can on its own request the VLAN:ISID from the XOS switch, which can signal that back to the Fabric Connect FA Server. So no need to configure any VLANs on XOS.
- Ability to do Network Access Control and use new FA RADIUS attributes which instead of placing users on VLANs can place users directly on VLAN:ISID service (bindings); again no need to manage the XOS with VLANs.
- Or simply ability to manually attach an edge device to a VLAN:ISID; in this case one configures the VLAN, assigns the I-SID and adds the VLAN to the access port; in this cased you are only gaining that you don't need to manage the XOS uplinks into the FA Server.

[andreas1]

Cool any good pointers in VOSS documentation on FA and how you can incoroporate this with extreme devices ?

For instans what does this bring me in terms of functionality ?

[Stephane_Grosj1]

on EXOS, nothing complicated:

config vlan xxxx add nsi xxxxxx

on VOSS, on the interface:

fa enable
no fa message-authentication
no shutdown

[andreas1]

Trying the same on VOSS vm and a 22.4 vm,
I'm struggling to find the commands to run on both the extreme and the VOSS ? Any pointers ?

[Stephane_Grosj1]

fwiw, lldp default timer on EXOS is 120sec, instead of 30sec on VOSS. Nonetheless, you shouldn't run into such an issue. If this is not production, I would recommend to start from scratch, from a default config on EXOS. Something must be hidden somewhere in your config. Do you have some default.xsf or autoexec.xsf files doing some automatic config, or NMS pushing some config as well that might interfere?