Thanks in advance for reading this post. I have five HP V1910 switches, three for office LAN, one for the server rack and the last was purchased for redundancy in the server rack. The first of the three for the office LAN has links to each of the other switches (hub and spoke topology from what someone else told me), and it is connected to the router that provides internet connectivity. This should mean that any device should only have one hop to get out to the internet and there should be no STP involved.
The redundant switch is now setup in the rack and it has a link to the main switch which connects everything together. The problem occurs when I try to link the two server rack switches together. This additional link between the two is specifically set for the storage VLAN which is a different VLAN than the office VLAN but as soon as it is connected, I lose connectivity to this switch (eg a continuous ping to this switch starts timing out).
Based on what I'm reading on this forum, it appears to be related to STP since that is now introduced with me linking these switches together. In the switch GUI, it has a section called MSTP and lists the following global settings:
Enable STP Globally: Enabled
BPDU Protection: Disabled
Mode: RSTP
Max Hops: 20
Path Cost Standard: Legacy
Is it the mode of STP that is being used that is causing this issue? I thought that since it was a different VLAN that it wouldn't have a problem with me adding a link between the switches. Or perhaps I shouldn't be even linking the two switches together? The thought was that since each physical host and storage has two links, we could separate the two links between the two switches and if one switch dies, then the environment still keeps running.
I appreciate any feedback. Thanks!
Best Answer
It appears the issue is with the setup using RSTP and that is causing it to drop packets on the link with the primary VLAN. Since it's not a huge concern, the link between the switches will be removed for now until I learn more about MSTP.