RE: Practicing Clustering - your opinion requested

I would say you are right on the money here Andrew...one of those topics
where I would say "do it once so you have seen it and aren't shocked on lab
day just in case". I don't think it is probable you will see it, but good
to know it, and a lot of places still have old busted 3500 series switches
that use this technology in their live environment (I know my last employer
did). I mean, the current stackwise technology is pretty much taking over,
and is much cooler : ) Anyways, for implementation when I did this my one
time I just went straight to the 3550 config guide...there is a chapter on
it if I recall, and shows you step by step.

Interesting about VLAN 1. I thought that even if you prune it , it is still
actually there for things like STP, VTP, CDP , etc.

Regards,

Joe Astorino
CCIE #24347 (R&S)
Sr. Support Engineer - IPexpert, Inc.
URL: http://www.IPexpert.com
 
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of ALL
From_NJ
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 12:38 AM
To: Cisco certification; David Clark
Subject: Practicing Clustering - your opinion requested

Hey Team,

Not much IMO on the clustering commands and configs via the docs. This
seems pretty easy though, but I would love to learn from you all.

What I have done: Enable the cluster master via the following commands:

cluster enable CCBOOTCAMP 0
cluster member 1 mac-address 0023.0512.e380 cluster member 2 mac-address
001b.d4c9.1380 cluster member 3 mac-address 0022.be94.f100

Can you tell whose workbooks I am currently using ... ;-)

The mac address used for the members is the one from the show version
command on each member switch. Everything seems to work, CDP is working
it's auto-magic. I used the rcommand to access each member and the output
of the command 'show cluster" looks good.

The lab I was working tonight had earlier asked me to only forward VLANs
through the trunk links that are needed for the remote switches. I used the
command: switchport trunk allowed vlan to allow only the VLANs configured /
used on the remote switches. I had to use this command since each switch
was configured in vtp transparent mode and I could not simply enable vtp
pruning..

Hummm ... Cluster seems to only work when there is a common VLAN throughout,
and it appears to require VLAN 1 (at least in my tests). Since my lab does
not use VLAN 1 for any device access, I find myself adding this to the
allowed vlan list just so that clustering works. All is well with this is
in the allowed vlan list

Any comments?

Any other gotchas I should practice or be familiar with? As always I
appreciate you all. Have a good night,

--
Andrew Lee Lissitz
all.from.nj_at_gmail.com
Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net