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Tonny
Asked: 2012-02-09 12:33:09 +0800 CST

Cisco 4900M trunk to HP ProCurve switch. Will this setup work?

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As I previously ran a Cisco only shop I'm not sure if this is going to work. On paper it looks OK, but you never know.

Will it work ? Are there special considerations that I need to be concerned about ?

I've got the following situation to deal with: Cisco 4900M core-switch in server-room A. HP ProCurve 2810G in the same room/same rack. 2nd ProCurve 2810G in server-room B some 80 meters away. Got plenty of OM3 fiber between the rooms.

I need to establish to each ProCurve a 2 Gb/s trunk for 3 VLAN's, with a possible extension of capacity to 4 Gb/s later.

I'm thinking of doing the following:

For the ProCurve in the same rack: Just run 2 Cat6a patches from the UTP uplink ports on the ProCurve to a TwinG converter with 2 GLC-T SFP's placed in a X2 slot on the 4900M. Turn these 2 links in a port-channel and run dot1q over it.

For the other ProCurve: Basically the same thing but use 2 HP X121 SFP's on the ProCurve uplink ports and a TwinG with 2 GLC-SX-MM SFP's on the 4900M.

For the 4Gb/s upgrade I can just double the links to each switch and add these to the port-channels.

P.S. I'm not worried about the actual configuration of the switches and channels. I have Cisco and HP experts available to do that when those server-rooms are being build. It's just that currently the project is still in design and planning phase and the services of those experts are not ordered yet. I'm just trying to prevent a situation where, during the actual implementation, it's discovered this is not working. At that point ordering a replacement solution would be too late in the game to keep the deadline for go-live.

networking cisco hp hp-procurve

3 Answers

  1. Yes, that'll work just fine.

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  2. Best Answer

    Yes, this will work.

    I have a working example of a similar setup in my data center containing Cisco 4900M's and HP ProCurve 2810-24G switches (but with shorter fiber runs). We're fine running trunks/dot1q to the HP switches while using the Cisco's as core switches. There's nothing odd about this configuration.

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  3. All switches support 802.1Q VLAN trunking, so yes, they'll work fine together (although you'll have to setup VLANs manually on each switch, because only Cisco switches have VTP).

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