Peter Robinson <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>The higher end ones take ages to negotiate because they try and neg
>Spanning Tree Protocol first so the port goes through a blocking,
>discovery and then is finally into the forwarding stage.
"Higher end" switches (such as el cheapo Dells) can take up to 50 seconds to
start forwarding data while the Spanning Tree Protocol runs through its
BLOCKING, LISTENING, LEARNING, FORWARDING states; but that is assuming you are,
for some reason, running STP on an Access port.
Normally you'll have configured these with the equivalent of (Cisco) IOS'
"spanning-tree portfast" to shortcut directly from BLOCKING to FORWARDING.
Semi-recent IOS can also do this for trunk ports if you need to pass tagged
VLANs out to your server for some reason.
IOW, switches that take ages to start passing traffic on Access ports — where
all relevant FC boxen will live — are either mis-configured or broken.
Or not configured. The number of sites that I've been to that have
switches that run the default config is amazing and its a question
that needs to be asked.
Pete