From: asadovnikov (asadovnikov@comcast.net)
Date: Thu Jun 03 2004 - 23:38:57 GMT-3
I have to say that theory of VTP V3 certainly looks more appealing to me
that previous versions. It is however fairly new and I trust requires CatOS
8.1 (VLAN information only) or 8.3 (VLAN + MST), and I do not believe it is
in IOS yet. As the software features are added and the software which
supports it becomes general deployment, V3 going to become an important
player. It is hard for me to predict though how important as timeline and
scope of support hard to predict at this point.
Having said all that the reason I do not like VTP has little to do with
features of a particular version of a protocol; I rather do not see a useful
place for VTP from design perspective.
Back when flat earth was a way to design networks VTP was useful. This days
the networking trend way I see it is to run IP routing on as many boxes as
possible. Advantages of running L3 box versus to L2 box are numerous; and
the only disadvantage is price. The dollar premium paid for L3 box was
coming down every year and I trust has reached the point when benefits of
extra functionality overweight few extra dollars in cost. Going forward I
would expect this trend to continue, price gap to become smaller, extra
features of L3 boxes be more important.
I could go on for hours on how L3 technologies are better understood, better
scale, better work... To cut the story short... Certainly on the
distribution and core I would expect this days everybody to run L3; and I do
not expect VLANs to span campuses any longer, I expect VLANs to be used on
trunks between boxes with each vlan be local to 1-2 (3 on rare occasions)
boxes. Given this I do not see how VTP makes anything any better, there is
simply no need for VTP to assist when scope is so small, but it can be
involved upkeep even on such small scale.
Best regards,
Alexei
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Howard C. Berkowitz
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 9:25 PM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: RE: Connecting two core switches / Design
At 7:46 PM -0400 6/3/04, asadovnikov wrote:
>Assuming that your core is L3 (which it really should be), for 2 gig I
>would rather see you use 2 independent point-to-point L3 links. CEF
>loadbalancing will be almost as effective as EtherChannel, while
>EtherChannel is real difficult to troubleshoot. If you have your mind
>set on EtherChannel go with L3 one.
>
>In most today networks VTP brings no benefit, so I would recommend you
>to run all you boxes in transparent mode (not in server mode). It is
>fine then to use same domain name. If you think you will benefit from
>VTP let me know why you need it, and I may be able to give you another
>recommendation.
>
Do you feel VTP is any more useful with Version 3? I will admit I
originally thought of it as a compatibility tool, when you mixed ISL,
LANE, 802.10 SDE, etc.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Jul 03 2004 - 19:40:32 GMT-3