User guide

Automatic Fabric Overview Configuring Automatic Fabric
page 14-10 OmniSwitch AOS Release 7 Switch Management Guide March 2015
Automatic Fabric Port Eligibility
The following conditions determine whether a switch port is eligible to participate in the Automatic Fabric
discovery process:
• The port has no previous configuration that would prevent the port from joining a link aggregate,
forming an SPB adjacency, serving as a UNP SPB access port, and enabling MVRP to run on the port.
In other words, there is no switch configuration that is applied to the port that would prevent the port
from participating in any of the protocols managed by the Automatic Fabric feature. If a port meets
these requirements, the port is considered to be in a default port state.
• If MVRP discovery is enabled (the default) and the Spanning Tree mode is set to per-VLAN (1x1),
Automatic Fabric will automatically change the Spanning Tree mode to flat. This will allow switch
ports to participate in the MVRP discovery process.
• For a port that has MVRP enabled through Automatic Fabric but has no VLAN registrations, if
removing MVRP would result in the port returning to its default state, then Automatic Fabric will be
enabled on that port.
Note that Automatic Fabric discovery and configuration of IP protocols is only performed on existing IP
interfaces. As a result, port eligibility is not considered in this case. See
“IP Protocol Discovery” on
page 14-13 for more information.
Automatic Fabric Discovery Window
The Automatic Fabric discovery process initiates a time period during which Automatic Fabric ports are
examined to detect any configuration for LACP, SPB, and MVRP. This time period is referred to as the
Automatic Fabric discovery window.
• Once a configuration is detected and written to the switch configuration file, the port state for
Automatic Fabric is disabled so the port will not participate in the next discovery window. This does
not globally disable Automatic Fabric for the switch.
• Whenever a port is brought up, the discovery window will be started provided no LACP is discovered,
no SPB-M adjacencies are formed, and, if MVRP is enabled, there are no VLAN registrations.
• If an LACP frame is received on a non-aggregate port with Automatic Fabric enabled, the Automatic
Fabric discovery window is started, provided no SPB-M adjacencies are formed and there are no
MVRP registrations on that same port.
• When the discovery cycle ends, the following occurs:
– The MVRP configuration for any port or link aggregate that does not have any VLAN registrations
is removed.
– The configuration for UNP SAPs dynamically created on UNP SPB access ports is removed only if
there is no traffic active on the access ports.
The discovery and configuration process for IP protocols is done in parallel, on a per-IP interface basis,
and is not tied to a discovery window time period. For more information, see
“IP Protocol Discovery” on
page 14-13.
LACP Discovery
The LACP discovery phase analyzes any LACP PDUs or automatic discovery LLDP PDUs received on an
Automatic Fabric port. This is done to determine if there is an existing link aggregate the port should join
or if creating a new link aggregate with a peer is necessary.