802.1Q Trunking Between Cisco and HP Switches

How to support different VLANs over a link between a Cisco switch and an HP Procurve switch could be confusing because of different terms and approaches used by the two vendors. This post aims to provide a short guide to make it work.

Notice that in the Procurve, the VLAN-port association is configured from the VLAN, while in Cisco IOS it is configured from the individual ports. Also "untagged" in the Procurve means "native" in Cisco terms, and "tagged" in the Procurve means "allowed" in Cisco terms. Now we can look at the actual configuration on both sides.

The configuration on the Cisco side should be:

On the Procurve side the configuration should be:

And yes, it worked:

PS: The last ping worked because I configured the default gateway on both switches (there is no VLAN 100 in the Procurve so the ping traffic has to be routed by the default gateways).

Link Aggregation between ProCurve and Comware Switches

Suppose we want to do link aggregation between ports A1-A2 on the ProCurve 5400 side and ports GigabitEthernet 1/0/1 and 1/0/2 on the Comware 5900 side, with all VLANs permitted  and VLAN 100 as the untagged VLAN on the aggregated link. We can configure a static non-protocol link aggregation or a static LACP link aggregation as described below:

1. Configuring a static, non-protocol link aggregation:

On the 5900 Comware side, enter the following commands in system view mode:

interface bridge-aggregation 1
port link-type trunk
port trunk permit vlan all
port trunk pvid vlan 100
quit

interface gigabitethernet 1/0/1
port link-aggregation group 1
quit

interface gigabitethernet 1/0/2
port link-aggregation group 1
quit

On the ProCurve 5400 side, enter the following command in configuration mode:

trunk a1-a2 trk1 trunk

Also the interface trk1 must be untagged for VLAN 100 and tagged for all other VLANs.

For verification, issue the command display link-aggregation verbose in the Comware switch and show trunk in the ProCurve switch.

2. Configuring a static LACP link aggregation:

On the 5900 Comware side, enter the following commands in system view mode:

interface bridge-aggregation 1
port link-type trunk
port trunk permit vlan all
port trunk pvid vlan 100
link-aggregation mode dynamic
quit

interface gigabitethernet 1/0/1
port link-aggregation group 1
quit

interface gigabitethernet 1/0/2
port link-aggregation group 1
quit

On the ProCurve 5400 side, enter the following command in configuration mode:

trunk a1-a2 trk1 lacp

Also the interface trk1 must be untagged for VLAN 100 and tagged for all other VLANs.

For verification, issue the command display link-aggregation verbose in the Comware switch and show lacp in the ProCurve switch.

Distributed Trunking in HP ProCurve Switches

Distributed Trunking allows the aggregation of links from one device to two upstream switches. To the downstream device, the two upstream switches appear to be just one single switch.

In the figure above, a trunk (or if you prefer, an aggregated link) named Trk2 is formed from two links, the first link going from Port 1 in Switch 3 to Port A2 in Switch 1, the second one going from Port 2 in Switch 3 to Port A2 in Switch 2. So instead of link aggregation between 2 switches, here we have link aggregation between 1 switch and 2 others. Hence the name "Distributed Trunking".

To the downstream switch, i.e. Switch 3, the two upstream switches (i.e. Switch 1 and Switch 2) appear just like one single switch. This is made possible by the ISC (Inter-switch Connection) between Switch 1 and Switch 2. Switch 1 and Switch 2 must be of the same model and running the exactly same software version for the ISC to work. The ISC could be a single link, or an aggregated link as shown in the example figure above (Trk1).

The keepalive link helps monitoring the status of the ISC. It must be in a separate, non-default VLAN with ports dedicated just for that purpose. No data or synchronization traffic is sent over the keepalive link, so it is not essential to the operation of Distributed Trunking.

Here's how to configure Distributed Trunking using the example in the figure above. Besides LACP, static non-ptotocol trunks can be used as well.

In Switch 1:

trunk A1,A3 trk1 lacp
trunk A2 trk2 dt-lacp
switch-interconnect trk1

vlan 1024
     untag A4
     ip address 192.168.124.1/24
distributed-trunking peer-keepalive vlan 1024
distributed-trunking peer-keepalive destination 192.168.124.2

In Switch 2:

trunk A1,A3 trk1 lacp
trunk A2 trk2 dt-lacp
switch-interconnect trk1

vlan 1024
     untag A4
     ip address 192.168.124.2/24
distributed-trunking peer-keepalive vlan 1024
distributed-trunking peer-keepalive destination 192.168.124.1

In Switch 3:

trunk 1-2 trk2 lacp

For verification, run the command show lacp distributed. The output will look like below:

Certain network features are not supported when Distributed Trunking is configured. As of K/KA/KB.15.16:

- ARP Protection is not supported on the distributed trunks.
- Dynamic IP Lockdown Protection is not supported on the distributed trunks.
- QinQ in mixed mode is not supported.
- Meshing is not supported.
- Multicast routing is not supported.
- IPv6 routing is not supported.

Creating a Trunk between an HP ProCurve Switch and VMware ESX/ESXi

According to VMware documentation, ESX/ESXi currently does not support LACP. Therefore, the only link aggregation mode in the ProCurve that works with ESX/ESXi is the static trunk mode.

On the ProCurve side, configure the trunk as a static trunk:

HP-5406zl(config)# trunk a1-a3 trk1 trunk

On the VMWare side, use NIC Teaming and the Load Balancing option of “Route based on IP hash”:

- Click the ESX/ESXi host
- Click the Configuration tab
- Click the Networking link
- Click Properties
- Click the Virtual Switch in the Ports tab, then click Edit
- Click the NIC Teaming tab
- From the Load Balancing dropdown menu, select Route based on ip hash
- Verify that there are two or more network adapters listed under Active Adapters.

Reference: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1004048