How Extreme Networks support dual homing of its switches to a backbone network?

[Praveen_Goel]

Hi,

Does Extreme Networks support dual homing (or multi-homing) of its switches to provide redundancy in a network?

Does it support multiple Virtual Private LAN Service instances on virtual connections (e.g. pseudowires)?

Thanks,
Praveen

[Erik_Auerswald]

Hi Praveen,

to expand a bit on the VPLS part of your question:

VPLS is supported by EXOS. VPLS provides a multi-point to multi-point layer 2 VPN. This alone allows multi-homing of devices, as long as there are no layer 2 backdoor links. The case of backdoor links, i.e. layer 2 connections of VPN sites that do not use the VPN, is quite common, and EXOS provides different variants to deal with backdoor links using both standard (STP) and proprietary (ESRP, EAPS) protocols.

If you need to scale a VPLS deployment, EXOS provides support for H-VPLS (hierarchical VPLS) as well.

I am not sure if I answered you VPLS question... If you need to specify a transport LSP used by several VPLS and/or VPWS services, you can do so.

Thanks,
Erik

[Erik_Auerswald]

Hi Praveen,

Extreme Networks does support dual-homing and multi-homing in many different ways for both Layer 2 (e.g. MLAG, EAPS, ERPS, STP variants, ...) and Layer 3 (e.g. OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, BFD, VRRP, ...).

Multiple variants of VPLS multi-homing are supported as well, see e.g. the MPLS chapter of the EXOS User Guide.

Thanks,
Erik