6500 "Active/Active"

[MBrooksAirIT]

Hello All- Is it possible to have any active-active configuration on two 6500 cores other than using VSS?

[Jerry Ye · Accepted solution]

What do you mean by active-acitve??? SVI are forwarding on both switches???

You can do the odd-even VLAN design. Pretty much Odd VLANs are root and HSRP active on 1st switch, and Even VLANs are root and HSRP active on the 2nd switch.

HTH,

jerry

[MBrooksAirIT]

Currently we have all VLANs and HSRP active on Primary Core. And to answer your question Jerry, maybe. The reason I am being vague is because it was requested of me to put our cores in active-active without VSS. Before I openly guffaw, I want to make sure there actually is no other way to go active-active w/o VSS.

However, I want to hope they were referring to our FWSMs.

[nkarpysh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You may consider using GLBP instead of HSRP. However in this case you will need to isolate particular VLAN on single access switch. GLBP does not support spanning VLANs across multiple access switches as STP will block one of the links to core and it will not work.

Other way is to move to L3 between your 6500 and lower level (distribution or access) - in that case you can multipath using routing protocols.

Nik

[MBrooksAirIT]

Thanx. Not exactly what I was looking for but the implication here is that VSS is required.