SPB across other vendors?

[klanard]

Hello - this is an easy question hopefully not too much trouble to answer, probably been asked before...If we have a VSP deployment across a wide distance with fiber links, and in between a different vendor's switch is inserted as a repeated/bridge type of device, will the native SPB packets between two VSP devices still communicate properly? Such as a Cisco with Q-in-Q on it would that transport SPB packets between two Extreme/Avaya SPB switches transparently? Are there any gotchas? We have a situation where this will probably be required and I wanted to find out if it would work. Thanks!

[WillyHe]

Hello Klanard,

SPBM-FC uses L2 point to point and two backbone vlan's to establish SPBM-NNI connections.

Somehow you have to accomplish a point to point connection for these two vlans over the third party network.

There are few important things, one is the SPBM encapsulation overhead and the second is when jumbo frames (+9.000Bytes) are used, the maximum packet size must be supported in the intermediate network.

Ways to accomplish this are
- Creation of the backbone vlan's between two ports in the third party network. Disadvantage is that only one NNI point to point connection can be created over the third party network, also these vlan's must be available and cannot be used for other purposes in that third party network.
- Q in Q between two ports in the third party network. As more Q in Q connections between two ports can be configured then it is possible to have multiple NNI point to point connections over the third party network.
- Transparent-ports configuration between two ports over the third party network (feature is supported in SPBM networks :-)). Advantage of this is that ALL communication (tagged and untagged) is forwarded and e.g. VLACP can be used to detect end to end link connectivity, also multiple port to port "Transparent-ports" configurations are possible.

- SPBM-FE has two options, SPBM-FE-L2 and SPBM-FE-L3.
- L2 SPBM-FE: uses vlan translation for the two BackBone vlan's, for each NNI connection two different vID's are used. This can be a solution for the first solution (Creation of the backbone vlan's between two ports) to have more NNI connections over the same third party network.
- L3 SPBM-FE is using IP tunneling by adding a VXLAN header to the SPBM packets. limitations are extra encapsulation overhead and no jumbo frame support (at least in the early versions).

Hope this can help finding the best solution.

regards
WillyHe

[Jave]

Hi Klanard,

Yes, you can propagate your SPB domain through other vendors devices, like through Q-in-Q on a Cisco switch. The only caveat to know is that intermediary device MUST have MTU well defined because SPB Mac-in-Mac insert an overhead of 22 bytes on top of 802.1Q tagging overhead of 22 bytes: so you need a MTU of 1544 bytes on your intermediate device.

Regards.

[akannemeyer]

Hi Klanard

I would recommend using Fabric Extend across a third party network, but if you have some of the older VSP's without the Fabric Extend support you can look at the following post:

https://community.extremenetworks.com/t5/network-architecture-design/fabric-extend-over-isp-hub-and-...