Guys

I have recently taken over the management of a small LAN made up of 13 switches 10 Cisco and 2 Nortel switches.

The network is made up of a stack of 3750E-48 Port switches (x4), 3560E-48 Port (x2), 2960G-48 (x3), 3550E-48 (x1)and 2912XL-12 (x1).I also have a IBM blade chassis with a Nortel Layer 2/3 switch installed.

I have been looking at the Layer 2 config and most of it has been out the box installation the root bridge was the old 2912XL-12!! this has since been changed.

The Nortel switches do support RSTP and PVSTP... im just unsure which one to use? I am also unsure about where to deploy additional functionality such as BACKBONEFAST and UPLINKFAST.

The core of the network is the stack (3750 x 4) at the access layer I have trunks configured on the 2960's and 3560e (2Gbps) to the stack (core) and from the Nortel I also have trunks. Attached to the core are most of my servers, attached to the nortel are the blade servers and attached to most of the 2960Gs and 3560's are PC/Hosts.

Given the above which I know is vague what would people recommend I deploy in the environment with regards to the protocol and the use of UPLINKFAST and BACKBONEFAST, etc?

Thanks Darren