Users Guide

• Link aggregation control protocol.
• Spanning tree protocol. Refer to Configuring Spanning Trees as Hitless.
Graceful Restart
Graceful restart (also known as non-stop forwarding) is a protocol-based mechanism that preserves the forwarding table of the restarting
router and its neighbors for a specified period to minimize the loss of packets. A graceful-restart router does not immediately assume that
a neighbor is permanently down and so does not trigger a topology change. Packet loss is non-zero, but trivial, and so is still called hitless.
Dell Networking OS supports graceful restart for the following protocols:
• Border gateway
• Open shortest path first
• Protocol independent multicast — sparse mode
• Intermediate system to intermediate system
Software Resiliency
During normal operations, Dell Networking OS monitors the health of both hardware and software components in the background to
identify potential failures, even before these failures manifest.
Software Component Health Monitoring
On each of the line cards and the stack unit, there are a number of software components. Dell Networking OS performs a periodic health
check on each of these components by querying the status of a flag, which the corresponding component resets within a specified time.
If any health checks on the stack unit fail, the Dell Networking OS fails over to standby stack unit. If any health checks on a line card fail,
Dell Networking OS resets the card to bring it back to the correct state.
System Health Monitoring
Dell Networking OS also monitors the overall health of the system.
Key parameters such as CPU utilization, free memory, and error counters (for example, CRC failures and packet loss) are measured, and
after exceeding a threshold can be used to initiate recovery mechanism.
Failure and Event Logging
Dell Networking systems provide multiple options for logging failures and events.
Trace Log
Developers interlace messages with software code to track the execution of a program.
These messages are called trace messages and are primarily used for debugging and to provide lower-level information then event
messages, which system administrators primarily use. Dell Networking OS retains executed trace messages for hardware and software
and stores them in files (logs) on the internal flash.
• NV Trace Log — contains line card bootup trace messages that Dell Networking OS never overwrites and is stored in internal flash
under the directory NVTRACE_LOG_DIR.
• Trace Log — contains trace messages related to software and hardware events, state, and errors. Trace Logs are stored in internal
flash under the directory TRACE_LOG_DIR.
• Crash Log — contains trace messages related to IPC and IRC timeouts and task crashes on line cards and is stored under the
directory CRASH_LOG_DIR.
For more information about trace logs and configuration options, refer to S-Series Debugging and Diagnostics.
Core Dumps
A core dump is the contents of RAM a program uses at the time of a software exception and is used to identify the cause of the
exception.
There are two types of core dumps: application and kernel.
High Availability (HA)
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