Distributed Trunking with HPE 5130?

Question

I am about to plan a Core Switch for a customer, who has only access switches connected to each other. I'd like to connect every core switch with two fiber connections to each of the two HPE 5130. I read somewhere, that you can only cross-connect if the switches support distributed trunking. The 5130 apparently does not support this.

This seems a little odd and if I had to guess, pretty much every full stack supports this. But before we buy the Core components I'd like to make absolutely sure that we can have the access switches cross connected on both 5130 switches

Anyone here who can tell me with absolute certainty that this will not be a problem?

Thanks a lot in advance

Answer 1

5130s are Comware based devices and support IRF (Intelligent Resilient Framework) stacking. This is a front-plane stacking technology, so you do not need to buy additional modules to support the stacking. You can stack up to 9 devices using the 10Gbps optics in the front panel SFP+ ports. I would recommend you don't go above 4 devices in a stack as there is the possibility for larger stacks to perform poorly. I'd also recommend using a ring topology for the stack.

Once the devices are stacked you can aggregate ports across chassis using the standard Bridge-Aggregation (L2) and Route-Aggregation (L3) commands. Configuring link-aggregation across chassis is the same as configuring link-aggregation on an unstacked single switch, apart from the interfaces are prefixed with the chassis number, so GigEthernet port 4 on chassis 2 becomes G2/0/4.

So yes, you can configure a link-aggregation group across devices and I have done this a number of times with 5130s.