Reboot

GbE2c is an Ethernet swich in C-class HP Blade. It’s quite confusing when I was trying to understand how to configure the switch, and finding documents about this switch is not as easy as looking for cisco switch documents.

The difference of “trunking” term in cisco and GbE2c has just make it worse, because it turns out “trunking” is called “tagging” in GbE2c, and “trunking” in GbE2C is the same as Cisco’s Etherchannel or Portchannel.

Configuring GbE2c from the command line interface can be done by using Alteon OS (OS) or ISCLI. AOS is a super simple CLI, and ISCLI is a CLI that’s imitates Cisco IOS. If you familiar with cisco IOS, most likely you will choose ISCLI, don’t you? You’re wrong.  ISCLI is a very bad imitation of Cisco IOS!

What will be explained here is how to configure vlan tagging in GbE2c. Vlan tagging is using the IEEE 802.1q standard -called dot1Q-, so it will communicate with the same protocol with cisco ISL trunking dot1Q.

The following are the ports mapping on GbE2C switches :

1-16 : Connected to NIC embedded blade
17,18 : Cross link, is a trunk (=cisco etherchannel) connection to the switch of the opposite bay
19 : management port
20-24 : uplink ports

Port 17 and 18 has to be enabled and added as vlans members that going to be passed over it.

For example, to add vlan 10 and 30 into trunk 17 and 18, you can issue these commands inside AOS command line:

/cfg/port 17/tag   -> activates vlan trunkin on port 17
/cfg/port 18/tag

/cfg/vlan 10/add 17  -> adds vlan 10 to the trunk on port 17
/cfg/vlan 10/add 18
/cfg/vlan 30/add 17
/cfg/vlan 30/add 18

If let’s say port 20 will be used as an uplink trunk (connected to the backbone or another switch), you can use these commands::

/cfg/port 20/tag
/cfg/vlan 10/add 20
/cfg/vlan 30/add 20

Dont forget to “apply”, because the new configuration is not effective before you manually issued the “apply” command.

To see the current vlan configuration, use:

/info/vlan