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Setting up an IRF fabric
Overview
The Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology is proprietary to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The technology virtualizes multiple physical devices at the same layer into one virtual fabric to
provide data center class availability and scalability. IRF virtualization technology offers processing
power, interaction, unified management, and uninterrupted maintenance of multiple devices.
Figure 1
shows an IRF fabric that has two member devices, which appear as a single node to the
upper-layer and lower-layer devices.
NOTE:
IRF member devices in this document are HPE 6127XLG switch modules.
Figure 1 IRF application scenario
Master
IRF provides the following benefits:
•
Simplified topology and easy management—An IRF fabric appears as one node and is
accessible at a single IP address on the network. You can use this IP address to log in at any
member device to manage all the members of the IRF fabric. In addition, you do not need to run
the spanning tree feature among the IRF members.
•
1:N redundancy—In an IRF fabric, one member acts as the master to manage and control the
entire IRF fabric. All the other members process services while backing up the master. When
the master fails, all the other member devices elect a new master from among them to take over
without interrupting services.
•
IRF link aggregation—You can assign several physical links between neighboring members
to their IRF ports to create a load-balanced aggregate IRF connection with redundancy.
•
Multi-member link aggregation—You can use the Ethernet link aggregation feature to
aggregate the physical links between the IRF fabric and its upstream or downstream devices
across the IRF members.
•
Network scalability and resiliency—Processing capacity of an IRF fabric equals the total
processing capacities of all the members. You can increase ports, network bandwidth, and
IP network
Subordinate
IRF link
Simplified to
1
IP network
IRF fabric
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