[ednog] Anyone deploying MSTP and/or RSTP as alternatives to spanning tree?

[Laura Kristoff]

Cisco has something called MSTP that is supposedly their interpretation of 
IEEE 802.1s.  I'm still trying to understand how it works but they say it 
uses RSTP (802.1w) which allows for faster convergence because it uses an 
explicit handshake to figure out the forwarding path.  I think the MSTP 
part cuts down on the amount of BPDU traffic and allows for load balancing 
as well as redundancy.

Before delving into this any deeper, I was wondering if anyone has 
considered this as an alternative to running STP on their switches?  We try 
to limit the number of vlans that we trunk around campus, but there's 
always some amount of trunking we end up having to do.

Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) with these technologies?



--
Laura Kristoff
IT Telecommunications and Network Services
847-491-4094   l-grill at northwestern.edu