[FQuest Notice] Switchgear upgrades

[Terra]

What: Potential network instability
When: 6/4/2016 (Friday night)
Window: 12am to 6am

We are removing and replacing the remaining older 100Mbit leaf switches and replacing them newer 1Gbit HP Procurve leafs...

The network instability should be kept to a minimum as we are mostly just moving switch port connections from old to new switch... However there is a brief time of interruption as the new switch has to learn and propagate the MAC address to all other switches...

This work is being done to create a better MSTP (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol) environment as we have found that the older Foundry switches were not playing nice and had caused a whole raft of problems a couple weeks ago... We are jettisoning them off our network, and baselining the whole infrastructure to promote stability and also better server to server communication speeds...

This finishes the phase 3 build out of our new leaf-spine networking architecture as we'll be adding 1 new spine switch and 5 new leaf switches...

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we kick up a little bit of dust while construction is underway... We promise to clean up when we are done...

[frankc]

You are simply...amazing! Thank you.

[Terra]

Thanks Frank, much appreciated!

We are starting to move some switch ports around to setup the new leaf-spine trunks...

There may be some occasional turbulence as we work on this throughout the night... If there are any unforeseen issues, I will followup here with details...

[Terra]

Phase 4 of this work has been completed, and we will need to schedule a minimum of two more windows to work on the next set of switches...

It took a bit longer than originally planned as we went the extra mile to make sure any potential problems were minimized nearing the point of elimination...

Overall there was little to no turbulence, and the only disruption was less than 2 minutes when we had to enable a trunk port that had been accidentally disabled (my bad)...

The next two maintenance/upgrade windows will be scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday and Friday nights...

[Bradley]

Terra, any chance you'd share any info with us the new switches and their spec.If you don't want to share with everyone please PM the info to me when you can. my a went out on me a dew weeks ago /
Any help or a slight budge in the right direction os great

A picture or two would be cool too. *paging Kevin*

Thanks a bunch!!!!

[Terra]

In the end, we selected the HP Procurve 2810 switches as they had everything we needed (rock solid MSTP) along with the density required to create a full leaf-spine deployment... They are very versatile when it comes to aggregating spine and leaf trunks... The MSTP design is working extremely well to ensure there are no unnecessary hops... At this point, I couldn't be happier with their flexibility and performance... These are battle hardened switches that have been out for awhile, meaning that most all of their quirks have been found and fixed...