Irf Overview; Hardware Compatibility; Chassis Compatibility; Card Compatibility - HPE FlexNetwork HSR6800 Configuration Manual

IRF overview

The Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology is proprietary to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
This technology creates a large IRF fabric from multiple devices to provide data center class
availability and scalability. IRF virtualization technology offers processing power, interaction, unified
management, and uninterrupted maintenance of multiple devices.
This book describes IRF concepts and guides you through the IRF setup procedure.

Hardware compatibility

This section describes the IRF and hardware compatibility.

Chassis compatibility

IRF is available only on HSR6802, HSR6804, and HSR6808 routers.
An HSR6800 IRF fabric can contain any combinations of these router models. For example, you can
use both HSR6802 and HSR6804 routers to build an IRF fabric.
An HSR6800 IRF fabric can have only up to two chassis.

Card compatibility

You must install the SAP-4EXP card to provide physical ports for IRF connection.

IRF benefits

IRF delivers 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 works as the master to manage and control
the entire IRF fabric, and all 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.
•
Multiple-chassis 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
processing capacity of an IRF fabric simply by adding member devices without changing the
network topology.
1