Wired Intelligent Edge

Hello community, I hope you all are having a good day.

We are migrating and updating our security/aggregation/core equipment in our data center (right now with CISCO and FORTINET), and we would like to use ARUBA in all our communications layers.

Right now I have a stack of 2 CISCO 2960 for aggregation and 2 CISCO 3560x in HA in our core.

My question is, which ARUBA equipment should I use to support our operation?

Our stack is only aggregation and L2 switching, I was thinking in an ARUBA 2530 stack, or should we go with a stack of 2930f? (remember, I'm not routing in my aggregation layer).

In my core I have a lot of VRFs and HSRP, the cisco 3560x is EOL and now I would need to upgrade to 9300 series, which ARUBA switches have the same hardware, processing power and the price is somehow alike to CISCO?

As I understand I can configure VRFs in ARUBA and HSRP is CISCO propietary but I can use VRRP, right? 

Thanks!

Hi,

There is no stack on 2530

If you have a lot of VRF/HSRP, the better is to use ArubaCX switches (83xx), you can use VRF and Active Gateway (it is a VRRP/HSRP with active/active))

Hello alagoutte, thanks for your answer.

I will check the 8320 switches and will see if they fit with our budget.

About the 2530's, that means that I need to use 2930f at least, right? Do I need to buy a separate stacking cable? I can't find anything on the internet.

Thanks for your help.

Regards.

for 2930F, you can use directly DAC cable

What do you need for your core ? (there is also new 6xxx ArubaCX for small core)

Alagoutte,

In our core we have about 18-20 VRFs, 3 interfaces in LACP connecting to our firewalls, 3 interfaces in LACP connecting to our virtualization hosts and some interfaces connecting to another clients hosts.

Every VLAN (about 40) has HSRP for HA.

About 5-10 static routes for VRF.

it is a lot of VRF !

You need to use ArubaCX for this

If you need VRF then you have basically two options in the HPE world:

• Go Comware NOS (Various Switch Series based on Comware 7 NOS, as example HPE 5710, 59xx and so on)
• Go ArubaOS-CX NOS (Aruba 8400X, 8325, 8320, CX 6400 and CX 6400 Switch Series only)

Thanks everyone for your answers,

We decided to use ARUBA CX 6300, P/N JL664A.

This will be my bigger migration from CISCO to ARUBA, I've always migrated L2 switches, APs and smaller things.

I've never configured VRRP and VRFs in ARUBA switches, so any help or configuration examples will be appreciated.