[nsp] 802.1q from Cisco switch to Dell 1655MC Blade switch

[Mark Taylor]

Hi everyone,

I realise that this question is not Cisco to Cisco specific, however I
wondered if anyone here has attempted this, or has any info - and don't mind
me posting about multi vendor stuff :o)

I'm trying to enable 802.1q trunking between the switch card in my Dell
1655MC blade server and a Cisco 2948G switch from a single port on each.

The purpose is so that via a single uplink cable from the blade switch to my
cisco switch cluster, I can have different blade servers in different vlans
that are present on my cisco's.

On the cisco I've enabled :-
set trunk 2/47 on 1-1005 dot1q

On the uplink port from my blade switch (ethernet 1/8) I've enabled :-
switchport mode trunk

When I do a "show trunk detail" on the cisco I get :-
Port      Peer-Port  Mode         Encapsulation  Status
--------  ---------  -----------  -------------  ------------
 2/47     unknown    unknown      unknown        unknown

This indicates to me that the trunk is not working correctly. I've tried
changing native vlans on the cisco and on the Dell switch, to no avail. I've
already got a couple of the Cisco's trunking in this manner with 802.1q and
VTP and I'm trying to get the Dell to do the same type of thing. I'm aware
that the Dell switch doesn't support VTP (cisco proprietary), but I don't
mind adding the VLANs manually to the Dell switch (there aren't many to
add).

I thought maybe it's something to do with mapping the Dell switch VLAN
numbers to the Cisco VLAN numbers (i.e. Dell VLAN1 is cisco VLAN1 etc.) but
can't find a way of configuring this on the Dell, so maybe I'm wrong,
however it doesn't even look like the trunk has come up between the two
switches, which I guess is the first obstacle.

Has anyone tried to do this or anything similar and have any config
examples/guidelines ? There doesn't seem to be a lot of information about
doing this anywhere on the internet.

Many thanks for any assistance, it would be greatly appreciated.
Mark.