Wired Intelligent Edge

Hi Gurus,

Hoping you can clarify some of my concepts here. If we have the below topology. SW1 is having an LACP trunk homed to the two core switches participating in the VSF.

Question 1) If i was to swap the VSF with VRRP what would i loose in addition to the fact that the switch will become hot-standby instead of active/active or logically one unit. 

A second question is if i am able to achieve full redundancy here what is Aruba trying to resolve with VSX and MLAG? If i were to replace VSF with VSX and LACP trunks with MLAG trunks conceptually what will i gain?

Question 1) You would lose the load balancing of the traffic across the chassis, and like you said it will not be an active active forwarding model.

Question 2) VSX will allow for near zero downtime when it comes to code upgrades. You will have the same active forwarding as VSF, but VSX also gives you an active-active gateway forwarding at L3 also, adding more resiliency. 

Thank you Dustin. 

Any chance i can ask you to elaborate on

"You will have the same active forwarding as VSF, but VSX also gives you an active-active gateway forwarding at L3 also, adding more resiliency"

Hi! you have to consider that VSF works with shared (unified) control, routing and switching planes approach across the two chassis (case of two Aruba 5400R zl2 in v3 only mode, active/standby model) while VSX works with a separated but synched planes where both chassis are active at the very same time. It's clearly more complex than that (the implications are more complex)...but this main difference explains others features.

So for you 1st question: "If i was to swap the VSF with VRRP what would i loose in addition to the fact that the switch will become hot-standby instead of active/active or logically one unit?" should be integrated with the deployment of "DT (Distributed Trunking) technology" along with the cited VRRP <- that's a way to have a sort of VSX-like approach keeping chassis separated (Pay attention: "sort of" doesn't really mean "equal to").

For your 2nd question: "if i am able to achieve full redundancy here what is Aruba trying to resolve with VSX and MLAG? If i were to replace VSF with VSX and LACP trunks with MLAG trunks conceptually what will i gain?" <- see above about VSX versus VSF (the fact that VSX uses two separated Chassis synced instead of unifying the control&management planes into a virtual plane - as it happens on VSF - mainly explains all the subsequent differences and pros/cons against the VSF approach).