CCIE Wireless Lab Video Training :: VSS

so let's talk about VSS or virtual switching system this is the technology that allows you to take two separate switches and sort of combine them into one large virtual switch so it looks like one switch to everyone else that might be connected to it it does this by actually merging the control plane of the two switches into one so from a configuration standpoint there is one massive config that configures the ports of both switches at the same time and we also have an active in a path or standby switch so the active switch is the one actually controlling both control you know the control plane of both switches so it's sort of shared on the one there and then if forever for whatever reason the active switch goes away at standby can become active and take over the control plane responsibilities if at least what's left over on the switch that's still left standing and the whole point in trying to take two switches into one is to have separate redundant you know devices for a physical redundancy but combine them into one so that we can essentially ether channel up to two separate switches you know if we look at our topology here this is what our topology normally looks like and a standard network without doing anything like VSS we have two different switches at the distribution layer so when you look at cat 3 or cat 4 you know it has a link up to cat 1 and a link up to cat - well they're two separate links yeah most likely these are probably layer two links right and the connection up to controller three is probably layer two links and so spanning tree is going to do its job you know if switch two is our route then probably this link is blocked between one and four and the link between one and three is blocked and these links are probably blocked you know maybe you are doing an ether channel here so at least you have two links there but these two links over there are definitely blocked whether you're doing an ether Channel or not on that side so we're not using all our thanks to their fullest capacity but when we create VSS what happens as those two separate switches now look like one physical switch so from cat three's perspective even though it's plugged into two separate physical devices it looks like the same device same thing with cat 4 controller 3 so now we could do ether Channel both links and rather than lose half my links to spanning tree I can have all of them forwarding at the same time as long as I do eat their channels here and so that's really the big thing it gives you back all the bandwidth they are giving up to spanning tree doing its job of blocking these redundant paths in your network so this technology in the wireless lab is one of those things I would probably consider it a lower likelihood you never know anything any technology could show up in any given lab but it's one of those things that's not really wireless specific at all it really has no bearing or very little bearing of how we configure most of our devices is just okay can i bundle all you know can I create an ether channel to this if it's split between two devices or not that's really about the only thing it affects from a wireless standpoint so they probably won't go into too big of a focus on this but it's on the blueprint it stayed from version 2 over to version 3 so if they kept it I would assume that they might test it at some point so you may want at least know the basics of it and we'll keep it at a pretty basic level we'll just get the two switches combined and then we'll create some bird some port channels across the two differents with physical switches here alright so from a configuration standpoint right now on count one and cat - we don't have a whole lot going on show ether channel summary I have one ether channel but that's up to controller one I don't have any ether channels over here and right now my links between the two switches are actually just access ports they're at a blank completely blank configuration so run and gig to 21 22 no configuration whatsoever on these two links so these port channels in these links actually come in two are important in terms of our configuration so when we start configuring these a couple things to keep in mind one if you do have existing porch nails like I have a poor channel 10 right there it's okay to have pre-existing poor channels to some devices on switch one and switch two here it's just they cannot use the same port channel numbers because what's gonna happens we're gonna take two separate running configs Schmoe em into one large running config that has configs for every single port in it which is fine for the physical ports because they'll get their own unique numbers but these port channels if I have port channel 10 and controller one and pour channel 10 and controller - you know how do we combine that that's we're gonna have a problem with that so use separate port channel numbers ideally do the VSS first and then create all your port channels after that number two we have to be able to create a port channel between the pair of switches and this is call our VSL or virtual switch link this is used for traffic between the two switches once VSS is doing its job so you know control plane traffic as we configure things on cat one and it manipulates stuff going on in cat - you know that's crossing the VSL or if I have you know device a on cat one that wants to talk to a device beyond cat - it has to ride that VSL link - to get between the different ports there so a couple of uses for that but that's a special port channel that we're gonna have to create there okay so the basics first thing we're going to do is we're going to define a domain so switch virtual domain and then give it a number I'll use 10 and then within virtual domain 10 this will be switch 1 we can only have pairs of switches so I'll be switch 1 and switch two but any switches that need to pair up need to use the same virtual domain ok so on cat - I'll do the same virtual domain number but I'll say it's switch 2 so switch virtual domain 10 switch - ok so we've defined our domain and said I'm gonna be switch 1 you're gonna be switched - next thing we'll do is we need to create the port channel for that VSL link so int pio and we need to use a unique versus all do 21 on cat 1 and 22 on cat to see even those the same ether channel that I'm configuring still unique numbers between the two alright so switch port switch virtual link and this is switch 1 so this is defining the port channel as that BSL link and no shut similar thing over here but just different numbers so into P Oh 20 I'll do 22 over here switch port switch virtual link to so because it's a switch - and no shut next we're going to add those physical ports into this VSL port channel so inch range gig to 21 to 22 and yeah these are just blank config ports right now so we'll do a switch port mode trunk channel group 21 mode on there we go so that's will be okay for now no shut and then do the same thing over here int range gig 221 222 switch porch mode trunk channel group 1 t2 mode on I'll shut and then the last step is we actually turn on VSS and this isn't going to cause our switches to reboot so let's switch convert mode virtual do we want to do this yes same thing over here switch convert mode virtual yes so I'll save our config kind of convert into a virtual switching config reboot and when they come back up they should try to sync up across that VSL so we won't make you suffer the the long reboot times on these forty five hundreds always pause the video when I come back we should be back from the reboot okay so at this point our reboot is complete and we actually did come up in the VSS SSL mode so let's go ahead and take a look at just a couple things so we'll go over to switch two which is was our stand but what's plus B or standby switch and if we look at the prompt to interestingly enough we see cat one so it's no longer showing as cat - this is now cat one all together here and we do see a standby so we know that it's not the active switches - standby switch and when your standby they give you a whole lot of options you can do either exit or logout so you know you choose whichever one you really want to do the idea is that you can't really do anything on the standby switch now this will take over as active if you take out controller one reboot it or something like that cat two will take over as the active but it's still gonna be you know pretending to be kept one in this case and if we look back a little bit the logs as we went along we can see that it initialized as the standby processor there we go so we see that on the active switch we can actually do our normal configurations here we see that it came up as the active processor it reached out and if I can get down to where I want to see so it's initializing being the active supervisor we see that the get down sorry a little bit farther there we go our interface is joining the porch nails for Channel 21 being my VSL and communication with the peer supervisor has been established and now they can talk to each other across that VSL then they do their little sync up in communications and that allows things to work so a couple of verification commands that we could run again everything's run on the active because we can't really run any commands except for those two wonderful commands over on this standby one but show switch virtual so we can see that switch mode that we are indeed in a virtual switch that we are using that domain of ten this the local switches switch one and then the other switch is switch to so there's a couple real basic pieces of config there we can also do a droll to the end of it and see a little bit more information here so just play around for commands there's a few other things that you could could look at but once it's up now I do a show in status and if I actually type it right we get a little extra number in front of things so it used to just be you know ten one 1/1 or gig 2/15 now they add the switch number to the beginning of it and so that's how we get a unique port number between switch one switch two they didn't just add you know if I had slot two is my last slot they didn't just say like three four or so I'm like that so now it's switch slot port number and so once I get slash the one slashes and now here's all the ports on switch - everything's starting to slash whatever and so now I can go ahead just configure the ports on either switches that I want and here's my poor channel so again both port channels all kind of came together that's why you don't want to have the same poor channel number because we're gonna have to merge these two configs now that I have this virtual switch up let's go ahead and create some port channels we'll start off with cat 3 so from Kathy's perspective let's do let's take a look Josie 2p neighbor I have two and they both say cat one so it looks like the same switch at least from CDP is saying that it's the same switch we see the ports that they're on good stuff let's create the port channel so inch range gig 1 0 21 22 there we go yeah I will just say a channel group 3 mode active will go on these which cat one int range gig 1/2 / 23 and pig 2 / 2 / 23 Channel group 3 mode I'll do active on this side as well takes a little a little extra computing than the old head there to try to figure out what my port numbers are but there we go show ether channel summary and now cool I successfully have a multi channel here cap 3 is ether channeling to 2 separate physical devices that are just pretending well they are one logical device here and we could do the same thing through 2 controller 3 we could create a four port ether channel so do the same thing again into range gig so it's on switch one to 11 to 12 and 2 to 11 to 12 say channel group for mode and I want we do Peggy here and go on the other side inch range te 1 0 1 2 4 channel group 4 mode so I herbal use PEG key on that side and let's see if we actually get the ether channel to work as expected a whole bunch of downs show and status disabled that might be why int range T 1 0 1 4 no shut see if that gives us what we want alright I should be attempting to come up now show ether channel summary they're making their way up making their way up and that's what we want to see so now we have 4 ports all capital P's we have the su port channel up again across two separate devices so that's what VSS has really given us now I can use every single link on controller 3 I can use every single link on on cat 3 or cat 4 if I so chose now I don't know that they would ask you to do this but let's say that you had to get out of VSS mode and go back into standalone mode again I don't think that they're gonna ask you to do that but just in case let me show you how you can do that it's pretty simple although there's a lot cleanup afterwards so back on just enable mode not in configuration mode switch convert mode standalone and we can only configure this on the active supervisor or the active switch right now right because we can't configure anything on the standby so what's going to happen here do you want to do this yes all right so my switch is gonna reboot as this goes down what's going to happen is cap 2 is actually going to take over as the active switch for VSS and so without too long there we go and now I'm no longer the standby switch I can do my configurations same thing over here switch convert mode standalone yes to this there we go and it's going to reboot and at the end of the reboot what I've seen in the past and it's probably gonna have happen again is all of the ports are we're disabled so there's gonna be a whole lot cleanup to do you have to go through all your ports make sure all the parts that should be up or up you might have to reconfigure some ports so for that reason I don't know if they would be that mean as to force you to leave it but just make sure that after you reboot come back up in that standalone mode look at all your ports make sure that they're all administrative Lee in abled you know shut um make sure that you didn't lose any configurations that everything's still you know an access port or a trunk port or whatever it's supposed to be take a peek at those port channels just in case so again unlikely but just in case so that's really BSS pretty basic again probably not something you're gonna see in the lab but just in case that they do want to throw this at you you should know how to get this working you

Channel: IPexpertInc

Views: 12,003

Keywords: CCIE, CCIE Wireless, CCIE Wireless V3, CCIE Wireless V3 Lab, CCIE Training, CCIE Videos, CCIE VOD, Wireless VSS, iPexpert, Jeff Rensink

Id: h8RYq0TjSgQ

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2015