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

[Morgan McLean]

I know I need the XRE200, but my question would be why? Why is this the
only EX product requiring external RE's? And also, it looks like you need
two local RE's to be able to connect to two external RE's? Seems
unnecessarily expensive.

Also, are the 8XS required for inter connects? Right now I only have two
8208's each with an 8XS and the 40 port 10g card, but I plan on adding
another 40 port and in the future two additional EX8208's at another site
with two 40 port 10gig cards each, no more 8XS cards. I would like to
spread the interconnections across two cards to protect against a module
failure.

Morgan

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Giuliano Medalha <giuliano at wztech.com.br>wrote:

> 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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>
>