Unicast Storm Control; Recommended Network Switches For Hp Storevirtual 4000 Storage - HP StoreVirtual 4000 White Paper

Technical white paper | HP StoreVirtual 4000 Storage
Nice-to-know
• RSTP and MSTP achieve faster convergence on uplink or ISL ports than the traditional STP protocol.
• MSTP and RSTP are industry-standard IEEE spanning tree protocols; and are the default protocols supported by switch
manufacturers adhering to open and industry-standard network protocols.
• A switch port connected to the network interface of a server or storage node is commonly considered an edge port. This
type of port should not be configured to participate in the STP protocol process.
Best practices
• Do not enable RSTP/MSTP on a switch access port connected to end stations (i.e., iSCSI initiator or storage node); if
RSTP/MSTP is enabled, configure the port as an edge port.
• Configure BPDU guard on ports configured as edge ports to prevent ports configured as edge port from sending or
receiving BPDU.
• Minimize the dependence on RSTP/MSTP (i.e., use Stacking, Virtual Switching Technology, IRF)
• Enable RSTP/MSTP on all ports between switches.
• Set the root bridge manually rather than allowing the switches to go through the root bridge election process.
• Configure RSTP/MSTP in all cases where two or more switches are interconnected via more than one physical link to
help minimize the chance of a network loop caused by improper configurations (i.e., IRF, link aggregation group, and
stacking of switches).

Unicast storm control

A traffic storm occurs when an excessive amount of packets create network traffic that is transmitted by a single port and
sensed by the switch as a traffic storm (i.e., denial of service). ISCSI traffic is bursty in nature and may sometimes utilize a
very high link percentage, which is incorrectly sensed as a traffic storm by the switch.
Best practices
HP recommends disabling unicast storm control on iSCSI ports.

Recommended network switches for HP StoreVirtual 4000 Storage

HP Networking has an extensive portfolio of Ethernet switches that are ideally suited for iSCSI deployments. These
switches are designed to deliver high-performance, low-latency, and wire-speed Layer 2 to 4 network services.
HP Networking top of rack series of switches offer unmatched combination of 1GbE and 10GbE ports density, high-
availability architecture, Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology as well as a full range of Layer 2 and or Layer
3 features depending on switch selection. These switches are built to support open and industry-standards networking
protocol.
These switches can be deployed within the network core or as a high-performance switch in the convergence layer or
network edge of SMB and enterprise networks.
Listed below is a selection of recommended top of rack models. These are the 3800, 5830, 5920, and 6600 series.
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