Force10 MXL: Initial Configuration

Continuing a series of posts on how to deal with Force10 MXL switches. This one is about VLANs, port channels, tagging and all the basic stuff. It’s not much different from other vendors like Cisco or HP. At the end of the day it’s the same networking standards.

If you want to match the terminology with Cisco for instance, then what you used to as EtherChannels is Port Channels on Force10. And trunk/access ports from Cisco are called tagged/untagged ports on Force10.

Configure Port Channels

If you are after dynamic LACP port channels (as opposed to static), then they are configured in two steps. First step is to create a port channel itself:

# conf t
# interface port-channel 1
# switchport
# no shutdown

And then you enable LACP on the interfaces you want to add to the port channel. I have a four switch stack and use 0/.., 1/.. type of syntax:

# conf t
# int range te0/51-52 , te1/51-52 , te2/51-52 , te3/51-52
# port-channel-protocol lacp
# port-channel 1 mode active

To check if the port channel has come up use this command. Port channel obviously won’t init if it’s not set up on the other side of the port channel as well.

# show int po1 brief

Configure VLANs

Then you create your VLANs and add ports. Typically if you have vSphere hosts connected to the switch, you tag traffic on ESXi host level. So both your host ports and port channel will need to be added to VLANs as tagged. If you have any standalone non-virtualized servers – you’ll use untagged.

# conf t
# interface vlan 120
# description Management
# tagged Te0/1-4
# tagged Te2/1-4
# tagged Po1
# no shutdown
# copy run start

I have four hosts. Each host has a dual-port NIC which connects to two fabrics – switches 0 and 2 in the stack (1 port per fabric). I allow VLAN 120 traffic from these ports through the port channel to the upstream core switch.

You’ll most likely have more than one VLAN. At least one for Management and one for Production if it’s vSphere. But process for the rest is exactly the same.

The other switch

Just to give you a whole picture I’ll include the configuration of the switch on the other side of the trunk. I had a modular HP switch with 10Gb modules. A config for it would look like the following:

# conf t
# trunk I1-I8 trk1 lacp
# vlan 120 tagged trk1
# write mem

I1 to I8 here are ports, where I – is the module and 1 to 8 are ports within that module.

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Tags: access, blade, dynamic, ESX, ESXi, etherchannel, Force10, LACP, MXL, port, port channel, static, switch, tagged, trunk, untagged, VLAN, vmware, vSphere