[c-nsp] Experience Interconnecting Cisco and Ciena or Cisco and Ceterus Switches

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 03:18:37PM -0800, Leah Lynch (Contractor) wrote:
> I am working on a project to connect a Cisco 6500 switch between
> switches of two other manufacturers - Ciena 5300 and Ceterus 8212
> devices. Has anyone out there run into any issues connecting to these
> devices using 802.1q? The Cisco switches will just be bridging tagged
> traffic from one device to the other. The only issue I can think of is
> Cisco's use of the native VLAN. However, I have seen Cisco switches
> connect to other switches that do not have the concept of a native VLAN,
> and there were no issues in those cases.

Gotchas you could run into:

 - native VLAN - how do the other two switches handle untagged packets 
   on a 802.1q link?  -> I'd go for "all tagged", that is, make the
   "native" VLAN on the Cisco something that is not on the link at all.

 - VLAN 1 - this is "special" on smaller Cisco switches, so we tend to
   completely avoid usage of VLAN 1.

 - per-vlan spanning tree (if you have redundant links) - many vendors
   don't seem to understand that "single-STP plus VLANs" = "deseaster",
   so you might be forced to use MST.

   (Forget that if you have no redundant links)

gert
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USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
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