Cisco 3020 Blade Switch for HP Blade Server

astanislaus · ‎10-21-2007

What is the best practice for managing these switches?

1) Give the fa0 interface an IP address

OR

2) Give VLAN 1 an IP Address

What are the advantages / disadvantages of doing one over the other?

lgijssel · ‎10-21-2007

For management interfaces, it is important that they are always up and reachable. A physical interface goes down when it's link goes down, a vlan goes down only when the last interface (including trunks) in the vlan goes down.

Therefore, you should not want to configure a physical interface, when it goes down, the whole device becomes unreachable for network management.

Using a vlan for this will give you a higher availability and the option to use redundant paths to your NMS.

regards,

Leo

astanislaus · ‎10-22-2007

LEo,

Thanks. But if the inband network has a problem (for example broadcast storm) then getting to the 3020 switch via inband may be a problem. But via the OA module in the blade server to the interface fa0 may be more reliable under this circumstance for troublesooting the broadcast storm for example.

lgijssel · ‎10-22-2007

How often do you really expect to experience a broadcast storm?

In a modern and well designed network, chances for this are minimal so you might be planning for something that will never occur.

Leo