Administrator Guide

Concept Explanation
● Pre-Forwarding State — A transition state before moving to the Forward state. Control traffic is
forwarded but data traffic is blocked. The Master node Secondary port transitions through this state
during ring bring-up. All ports transition through this state when a port comes up.
● Disabled State — When the port is disabled or down, or is not on the VLAN.
Ring Protocol
Timers
● Hello Interval — The interval when ring frames are generated from the Master node’s Primary
interface (default 500 ms). The Hello interval is configurable in 50 ms increments from 50 ms to 2000
ms.
● Dead Interval — The interval when data traffic is blocked on a port. The default is three times the
Hello interval rate. The dead interval is configurable in 50 ms increments from 50 ms to 6000 ms.
Ring Status The state of the FRRP ring. During initialization/configuration, the default ring status is Ring-down
(disabled). The Primary and Secondary interfaces, control VLAN, and Master and Transit node information
must be configured for the ring to be up.
● Ring-Up — Ring is up and operational.
● Ring-Down — Ring is broken or not set up.
Ring Health-
Check Frame
(RHF)
The Master node generates two types of RHFs. RHFs never loop the ring because they terminate at the
Master node’s secondary port.
● Hello RHF (HRHF) — These frames are processed only on the Master node’s Secondary port. The
Transit nodes pass the HRHF through without processing it. An HRHF is sent at every Hello interval.
● Topology Change RHF (TCRHF) — These frames contains ring status, keepalive, and the control
and member VLAN hash. The TCRHF is processed at each node of the ring. TCRHFs are sent out the
Master Node’s Primary and Secondary interface when the ring is declared in a Failed state with the
same sequence number, on any topology change to ensure that all Transit nodes receive it. There is no
periodic transmission of TCRHFs. The TCRHFs are sent on triggered events of ring failure or ring
restoration only.
FRRP Configuration
These are the tasks to configure FRRP.
● Creating the FRRP Group
● Configuring the Control VLAN
○ Configure Primary and Secondary ports
● Configuring and Adding the Member VLANs
○ Configure Primary and Secondary ports
Other FRRP related commands are:
● Clearing the FRRP Counters
● Viewing the FRRP Configuration
● Viewing the FRRP Information
Creating the FRRP Group
Create the FRRP group on each switch in the ring.
To create the FRRP group, use the command.
● Create the FRRP group with this Ring ID.
CONFIGURATION mode
protocol frrp ring-id
Ring ID: the range is from 1 to 255.
Force10 Resilient Ring Protocol (FRRP)
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