Re: Data Center Shutdown Procedure

I was being a bit sarcastic about the spanning tree question 

It still always surprises me now a days when people still rely on it  in the DC no less. Maybe at the edge you can settle for it because companies want to save money, but in the DC? No way. Oh well  understood.

Yeah, agreed your products and vendors have a lot to do with the choices of what you can and cannot do / the designs you can implement. I would however suggest putting this on the 2014 projects list and try and get funding for redesign/new gear. Even tweaking STP is not good enough for the DC ... STP does not belong in any DC anywhere except for local switch loops. Between Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Avaya, etc  Arista coming soon, etc  a lot of vendors have overlays and or ways to eliminate STP.

A good discussion, please forgive the sarcasm! :)

Andrew

PS - any spooky designs for halloween? Some scary networks out there! Lol

.

On Oct 30, 2013, at 10:22 PM, James Poplawski <jb.poplawski_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Who uses spanning tree? Lots of people! I have two 3548s as a
> redundant core and a 3850 with a 10G uplink to each. How do I avoid
> spanning tree in this instance? How about an antiquated site with two
> 6500s and no VSS?
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Oct 30, 2013, at 5:36 PM, Andrew Lissitz <all.from.nj_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Old friends! I hope you all are doing well!
>>
>> Now a days, who needs spanning tree? You need to run spanning tree locally, in case someone plugs the switch into itself, but really  do you need spanning tree anywhere else?
>>
>> Between stacking, LAGs, Virtual Chassis etc . do you really need spanning tree anywhere? I might suggest a redesign when you all get a chance.
>>
>> If L2 is no good for you, (I am anti-L2) then I might suggest you consider an overlay technology using L3 MPLS VPNs over GRE or another overlay technology; there are quite a few overlay technologies now. I am biased towards OpenContrail since it is free, I think it is a good one IMO  (http://opencontrail.org) and it is GA and most the other solutions are still beta. Click the slide show on that link to learn more.
>>
>> In your case and with your question, if you direct all traffic to the DC that is up, I do not imagine any reason to power cycle your gear in the DC which is idle. Why should you? You should be fine. Spanning tree will eventually create a loop free environment, but again  who uses spanning tree today?
>>
>> I hope this is a test you are doing, and your friends on this mailing list are eagerly awaiting your test results! Do share please!
>>
>> Hope all is well!
>> Andrew CCIE 31840
>>
>>
>>
>> .
>>
>>> On Oct 30, 2013, at 7:48 PM, James Poplawski <jb.poplawski_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> My thoughts.
>>>
>>> Spanning tree will converge to what your running now. If it's running
>>> in prod and you saved your configs you'll be fine.
>>>
>>> The only one I can think of is VSS. Are you running two boxes in east
>>> coast and two in west coast. Or are you running one in one coast and
>>> one in the other? VSS can come up in a funky state, which is the
>>> master versus slave, but it's not going to blow things up. It's just a
>>> matter of who has the brains (ie running config).
>>>
>>> Typically when we have a shutdown, we save configs manually (dump them
>>> to a laptop/desktop). The only one were mindful of is our WAAS
>>> appliance because it's running a VB. Everything else is solid. This is
>>> even more of a precaution of our nightly kiwi backups.
>>>
>>> Another worry is working with electrical parts. The time stuff tends
>>> to break is when the power flips on. Do lightbulb tend to break when
>>> they're running for 8 hours or when you turn the power on? :)
>>>
>>> Another consideration would be BGP. Neighbors that are up the longest
>>> tends to win via the oldest route resident in best path selection.
>>>
>>> Hope this helps buddy, good luck!
>>> JB
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>>> On Oct 30, 2013, at 4:07 PM, Cisco Fanatic <ebay_products_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> ALL -
>>>>
>>>> We have 2 data centers across coast to coast. We are power shutting down 1
>>>> data center for 12hrs.
>>>>
>>>> We have 6500 (Core) running VSS, Nexus switches, 4500 switches, 3750 switches
>>>> to name a few.
>>>>
>>>> Now the question is - should we physically shut down the switches and
>>>> routers?
>>>>
>>>> My concern is that once the power comes up and if the switch have to be
>>>> physically rebooted again, the problem is that spanning tree will not
>>>> reconverge or we might have a network meltdown.
>>>>
>>>> What will someone recomemend in this situation?
>>>>
>>>> Yuri
>>>>
>>>>
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Received on Thu Oct 31 2013 - 09:44:52 ART