Many times in this group
questions came up why the S-Series and MXL/MIOA switches do use the same burnt
in MAC addresses for the switch internal (data plane) and management interface
interfaces and the problem that causes; especially on the MIOA/MXL switches.
Many different examples have
been given when this gives problems for customers, especially the people who
have used PowerConnect M-series switches earlier and
suddenly have huge packet-loss when they try to connect to the switch
management – all being caused by the same MAC address being used by
vlan-interfaces and OOB/management interfaces.
Also on rack switches like S4810
or S4820 people run in same problem even if they have a dedicated OOB LAN but
that does terminate on same core and the VLAN is also available on the core.
That it might be hard to change
on S-series I can follow as there might be only 1 burnt-in MAC address
available per switch; but on MXL and MIOA there are at least 3 MAC addresses
available/reserved: so changing the address used by the physical management
interfaces should be pretty simple and straightforward and the impact of the
change for installed base should be minimal: only if they would use static
ARP’s or similar a very small number of users might have issues: but that can
be avoided by making it configurable via CLI command like:
!
config
!
interface ma0/0
mac-address
alternative #this would
use next available burnt-in MAC address or
no mac-address
alternative # this would use same MAC on ma0/0 as on any SVI
inside the switch
mac-address user
nn:nn:nn:nn:nn #this would make
it user-configurable, which could be used on older hardware that only has one burnt in MAC address available
end
!
I’m really surprised that all
these discussions here in the past only led to one single Feature Request from
Harvey Lang for the S4810: after reading all the communication in these groups
I would have expected many more FR’s on this subject and for sure also on
MIOA/MXL.
As I –as tech-support- can’t
open FR’s I have to rely on commercial colleagues to open FR’s: so if you do
think it would greatly help your customer if we can change the MAC address used
for the management interfaces please do open Feature requests for your customers
situation. Without requests from sales it will never be changed.
Regards,
Jan Tonkens
Enterprise Technical Support Advisor
Brocade Certified FCoE Professional
Dell | EMEA Solutions Support Team
phone: +353 12792295
Dell Inc. Innovation House,
Cherrywood Science & Technology Park, Dublin, Rep of Ireland
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