[c-nsp] Cisco 3012 IBM Blade Switch Configurations?

[ChrisSerafin]

David Hughes wrote:
>
>
> On 14/02/2009, at 2:52 AM, ChrisSerafin wrote:
>
>> I will have a pair of 2960's upstream that will have 2 bonded 
>> etherchannels going into each switch blade from each 2960. The 
>> etherchannels will be trunk links and then I will configure the 
>> internal virtual switchports as trunks going into the XEN 
>> Server....XEN is just like VMware/ESX...... the server tags the VLANs 
>> depending on what network they need to be on.
>>
>>
>> Make sense at all? I've been google'ing until my eyes bleed trying to 
>> get up to speed on these devices.
>
> Yup, that makes perfect sense and is similar to our architecture (if 
> you substitute 6500 for 2960 you'd pretty much have our standard 
> setup).  We run nodes of ESX farms on blades in this configuration.  
> If you are planning on dense virtualisation or multi-node farms then 
> you'll need to be running MST for your spanning tree.  Running any 
> form of per vlan STP will have you running out of STP instances before 
> you run out of vlans you need to trunk to your ESX / Xen boxes.
>
That brings up a good point about STP. If I have 1 etherchannel going 
from each switch blade to each upstream switch, will the switches detect 
the loops or do I need to manually configure this? Thanks for your comments!

--chris