[c-nsp] Disabling PVST+ in mixed vendor network

[j.vaningenschenau at utwente.nl]

Hi,

Maybe this issue is more of a "campus" nature than NSP related... but I
think this list reaches more knowledgeable people :)

We're running a mixed vendor network: a couple of Cat6k switches
(Sup720-3B) at the core for L3 (internal routing, BGP) and some L2
switching on campus-wide VLANs, and a lot (300+) of HP ProCurve switches
for all other L2 switching needs.

We'd like to completely kill proprietary STP stuff from our network and
only run STP, RSTP and MST. Do any of you know a way to stop the Cat6k
from generating PVST / PVST+ and, more imoprtantly, from acting upon
accidentally received frames of that type?

We already drop PVST+ on all ProCurve switches that support it, but once
in a while a frame makes it through. Last time that caused a 10 GE port
to go into "PVST Inconsistent" state, dropping one of our DC's off the
network until we manually toggled the port down/up.

Due to historical, political and budgetary reasons we have to operate
large L2 domains. That's going quite well, but the last large
disruptions we had were all due to "PVST Inconsistent" ports while there
was nothing wrong with the logical topology. So I hope to get some
insight how to avoid that :)


Regards,

Jeroen van Ingen
ICT Service Centre
University of Twente, P.O.Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands