Thu, 7 Jan 2010
What I want from a blade chassis switch
- 802.1q (VLANs).
- 802.1ax (link aggregation) between the pair of switches in a chassis.
- 802.17 or another simple Ethernet ring protocol, but I can live with a decent 802.1d implementation (STP) as well.
- IGMP and MLD snooping, while not yet a mandatory requirement, would be appreciated.
Why link aggregation? It is the only simple solution for having complete fault tolerance without configuring the STP in the servers (which is annoying, because Linux does not implement portfast) or even worse OSPF.
That's it. I do not need routing protocols or even L3 routing at all, just a simple switch. But apparently the vendors would rather sell me an high end device...