Brocade switches per vlan STP support

Question

Do Brocade switches(FastIron, NetIron, ICX, etc) support using a per vlan spanning tree or do they only support a single spanning tree instance for all VLANs?

If they support per vlan:

• Is it enabled by default?
• What command(s) are used to disable/enable per vlan spanning tree for STP and RSTP?

We are not going to use MST so disregard that as a semi-answer.

Answer 1

It's important to note that PVST/PVST+ is Cisco proprietary.

They do support one instance of STP per VLAN, and it is enabled by default. You can enable/disable STP on the following levels (taken from the NetIron config docs):

• Globally - Affects all VLANs
• Individual VLAN - Affects all ports within the specified VLAN. When you enable or disable STP within a VLAN, the setting overrides the global setting. Thus, you can enable STP for the ports within a VLAN even when STP is globally disabled, or disable the ports within a port-based VLAN when STP is globally enabled.
• Individual Port - Affects only the individual port. However, if you change the STP state of the primary port in a LAG group, the change affects all ports in the LAG group.

Depending on your code rev, you can enter config mode for the VLAN and either do:

[no] spanning-tree

or

[no] rstp
[no] spanning-tree 802-1w (used on older versions of code)

I know that newer NetIron gear has PVST/PVST+ compatibility modes which you can turn on at the interface level with:

pvst-mode

But this also implies that you're going to be running MST, which you said you're not going to do.

Answer 2

According to the documentation I have here (specifically pertaining to the ICX series), enabling PVST should be as simple as configuring spanning-tree within each VLAN.

It is not enabled by default. Commands for configuring PVST are rather self explanatory:

(config-vlan-10)#spanning-tree rstp

Enables RSTP for VLAN 10

Other pertinent tab-complete commands are available under the spanning-tree command