Using MST on 4506/SUP 4 with VTP

aacole · ‎07-15-2007

I'm going to be installing several 4506 switches running Sup4 cards, and am considering using MST for the rapid convergence etc. These are core switches supporting 2960's at the edge.

Reading the documentation I see that the 4506 supports VTP v2, and will not propogate any of the MST information, for this I need VTP v3 which dosent seem to be available for the 4500 series.

Question is, can I run MST and VTP v2, if its possible, what if any features or advantages will it give me? Will this support vlan pruning?

Or am I better just configuring MST and manually sorting out the vlan mapping.

glen.grant · ‎07-15-2007

Any reason you can't run rapid pvst ?

Francois Tallet · ‎07-16-2007

Whether you run v1 or v2 will not make any difference with regard to MST. Both can do pruning (for the lower 1k vlan). As far as I can remember, v2 was introduced mainly for token ring switching so you may not even bother to go to v2 if you use vtp. VTP3 has been available for something like 4 or 5 years in CatOS, but it is not available yet in IOS. I'll try to propagate the feedback to marketing that some customers are requesting it, but if you could do it on your side, it would have much more impact.

In the meantime, you can pre-allocate vlans and instance in your MST configuration. This way, you can grow your network without having to change the vlan to instance mapping on each and every switch.

Regards,

Francois