Fabric Interconnect Stacking; Figure 2 - Vsp 7000 Vtor (Virtual Top-Of-Rack) - Avaya VSP 7000 Technical Configuration Manual

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1.1.1

Fabric Interconnect Stacking

1.1.1.1 Virtual Top-of-Rack Fabric Interconnect Stacking
Virtual Fabric Interconnect stacking (vToR), available starting in software release 10.1, provides stacking
for up to 8 switches with support for a total of 256 10GE ports. The servers can be attached to two or
more different switches in the vToR to provide dual homed active/active operations.
Figure 2 – VSP 7000 vToR (Virtual Top-of-Rack)
Connectivity from each server to the VSP 7000 vToR stack can be made up of 1 to 8 GigE or 10GigE
ports with or without VLAN tagging spread across a vToR stack of up to 8 units. The VSP 7000 vToR will
typically be provisioned with multiple VLANs to support native VLAN transport between the edge and core
as shown in figure 3 below. The core layer can either be a SMLT cluster made up of, for example, two
ERS 8000 switches or two VSP 9000 switches. The core SMLT cluster provides true active /active
resilience where any type of link or core switch failure will have little to no impact on data traffic. In
addition, all the links between the vToR and core are active /active with no requirement to run Spanning
Tree.
The core / aggregation layer will either transport the L2 VLANs or route the traffic. Typically the SMLT
cluster will route the traffic using either Routed Split Multi-Link Trunking Edge (RSMLT Edge) or using
VRRP with Backup Master. If there is a requirement to transport a VLAN, for example from one data
center to another to allow services like vMotion, the VLAN must be either provisioned on all switches in
the path between the two data centers or provisioned as a L2VSN on the interconnecting SPB switches.
Either way VRRP with Backup Master will be used at the two data centers with a common VRRP VIP to
provide routing to the rest of the network and, the edge to core connections are all active/active routed or
switched.
Avaya Inc. – External Distribution
10
August 2015