[j-nsp] How reliable is EX multichassis? 3300 and 8200 switches

[Giuliano Medalha]

Morgan,

We have some cases running EX8200 as a Virtual Chassis, but you will need
the XRE200 External Routing Engines:

http://www.juniper.net/in/en/products-services/switching/ex-series/options/xre200/

Don't forget that you will need the 8 ports (10 gig)  for chassis inter x
connections - EX8200-8XS

It is a very good topology and we have very good performance with not bad
uptime (196 days) right now.

Without STP problems.

We have used a lot of EX4200 pairs (48 port) connected by Virtual Chassis
for Client Access.

2 x 10 giga fiber (1 for each EX4200) connect using Aggregated Ethernet
Interfaces to both EX8200 (10 gig modules)

I really recommend it for you.

Att,

Giuliano




On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Morgan McLean <wrx230 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> So I run SRX as my core firewalls, with EX8200's doing core switching and
> EX3300's doing access switching. I have two SRX's, two 8208's, and two
> 3300's at every cabinet. Spanning tree is a pain in my ass, especially
> since I have other environments setup the same way, just with smaller
> switches. Right now the SRX reth interfaces only come down as legs, not
> full mesh. The top of rack switches have only one link active at a time,
> legs. The interconnects between the core switches of different environments
> are legs, not full mesh due to spanning tree constraints (it closes the lag
> center trunk between the core switches).
>
> It would be a lot easier if I could just VC the core and VC the access
> switch pairs so that multi-chassis lags can be run everywhere and I can for
> the most part cut spanning tree out of the picture and have greater link
> fault tolerance. How reliable is VC? I've really done my best to avoid it
> up to this point as I try to keep redundant systems as separate as possible
> so one doesn't take down the other. Then again, when it comes down to it my
> edge and core firewalls are all SRX clusters, so... :) lol
>
> I'm not really sure what kind of information I'm looking for here. I would
> just run 20G lags eveywhere instead of having 10G forward/blocking STP
> pairs. I don't really know how things work when a device fails, how fast
> convergence is, split brain scenarios etc.
>
> Any major lessons learned with this technology? I am aware that with the
> 8200's I would need the external SRE.
>
> Thanks,
> Morgan
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