[FQuest Notice] Switchgear upgrades

**Terra** · 06-09-2016, 05:24 PM

What: Potential network instability
When: 6/11/2016 (Friday night)
Window: 12am to 8am

We are removing and replacing the remaining older 100Mbit leaf switches and replacing them newer 1Gbit HP Procurve leafs... This is Phase 6 of the network switch upgrades...

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...

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we kick up a little bit of dust while construction is underway...

**Terra** · 06-11-2016, 12:08 AM

We are beginning tonight's switchgear replacements and hopefully there shouldn't be any problems... We are making every effort to make this as smooth as possible...

**Terra** · 06-11-2016, 06:00 AM

I am extending the maintenance window for an extra hour so that we can finish the router core re-cabling... We are nearing the finish line, so we are making the push to wrap up these network upgrades...

**Terra** · 06-11-2016, 07:36 AM

We ran into a link problem on one of the offline routers that took more time than it should have... The network card was showing a positive link, but it wasn't passing packets to the router backplane and we had to pull out the big guns to find and fix the problem...

I am bumping one more hour as we are down to the last connection relocation... We would like to know what sleep is again and don't want to say "so close - yet so far - the finish line is right there"...

**Terra** · 06-11-2016, 07:48 AM

Aaaaaand, we are done!

This was a complete redesign of our network to make sure that we will never suffer from another STP layer2 loop again, along with increasing the inter switch trunk capacity 20x (leaf) & 40x (spine) times over... We have also removed all but one of the older 100Mbit switches (MSTP capable) as we'll keep it around to use for internal systems that don't need or support Gbit speeds... No sense in wasting port density for things that don't need it...

Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding as we worked through all 6 phases of our network upgrades spread over multiple late nights...

Also a special thanks to the entire FutureQuest team for working with me to make this upgrade a reality, along with special recognition to Kevin for going way above and beyond to see this through with minimal problems...