BGP.guru

BGP.guru

Nerd blog.

09 Jan 2014

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.


Theodore Baschak - Theo is a network engineer with experience operating core internet technologies like HTTP, HTTPS and DNS. He has extensive experience running service provider networks with OSPF, MPLS, and BGP.