First Brocade CLI Experiences
I used Brocade equipment for the first time this week. Coming from primarily Cisco environments, but also having a little experience with HP Procurve (CLI and web-managed switches) and Dell web-managed switches, I was a little lost, but eventually found a few blogs with some base configs, and got used to the way of assigning VLANs to ports.
The particular switch model I was working with was the Brocade ICX 6430-24P switch. It had a base license, which is fairly comparable feature-wise with the Cisco Catalyst 2960S-24TS-L with the base license. Important items of feature set:
- layer 2 only
- management vlan
- default-gateway
- no routing
These switches are deployed as access layer switches, POE user facing ports with phones tagging VLAN. in Ciscoland the config snippet would look as follows:
vlan 2
name users
vlan 3
name voice
vlan 4
name management
interface range gi1/0/1 - 22
switchport mode access
switchport access vlan 2
switchport voice vlan 3
spanning-tree portfast
On the these Brocade switches the same config snippet would be as follows:
vlan 2 name users by port
tagged ethe 1/1/1 to 1/1/22
vlan 3 name voice by port
tagged ethe 1/1/1 to 1/1/22
vlan 4 name management by port
tagged ethe 1/1/24
management-vlan
interface ethernet 1/1/1 to 1/1/22
dual-mode 2
inline power
voice
Overall, after getting things going I’m fairly impressed. I’m definitely not disappointed. Observium discovered them, and discovers neighbours thru CDP & FDP on them. I still need to verify that spanning-tree is running on them properly in all vlans that need to exist.