I noticed some shiny Aruba switches on the bench today, they were for a job my colleague is working on. (Note: Each switch in a stack should be the same model, so these will need two stacks!)

I work on the occasional HP/Aruba core switch, but it’s been a while since I did any work on distribution switches like these. The first thing I learned, was there’s no dedicated stacking cable for them. They simply use a 10Gb (Twinax / DAC) cable. Which I suppose is pretty straight forward, but it means you lose an SFP+ port (which is a bit pants).

Note: You can stack with 1GB cables, but you can’t mix and match!

So I said “Give me a shoult when you stack them and I’ll take a nosey!”

In the ‘land of Aruba’ this is called creating a VSF (Virtual Switching Fabric). As you can see from the photo, these are 2930F Switches, and you can stack up to four switches in a VSF. The same stacking method is used on the 5400R (v3) and 5412, where you can link two 5400R or 5412’s).

Also this method is NOT to be confused with ‘Fabric Stacking’ which is available on the 2920,2930M,3800,3810M models, (that is more like Cisco FlexStack, with a dedicated 100Gb stack cable).

So, assuming you have your switch new and fresh, connect in with your console cable, and dedicate a port to use for VSF.

Then place the switch into a VSF domain

The switch will ask for a reboot, let it do so.

Repeat the procedure on the second switch, (but this will be member 2).

Once again let the switch reboot.

Post reboot you will see the ports are ‘re-numbered’ 1/{port-number} on vsf member 1, 2/{port-number} on vsf member 2 etc.

show vsf or show vsf detail : Shows the list of provisioned chassis members.

show vsf link or show vsf link detail : Shows the state of vsf links for all members.

show vsf lldp-mad status : Shows LLDP MAD (Multi-Active Detection).

show vsftrunk-designated-forwarder : Shows designated forwarders for each trunk.

— Humberto Villanueva 2020/11/10 02:23