Virtual Connect and HP A-Series switches (A5820) IRF Integration Guide

Failover tests

Uplink failure

VM1 has a continuous ping to its default GW 192.168.1.1. Under normal conditions, vSwitch

hashes the traffic from this VM to the vmnic3, which is mapped to the VC2 and then enters the Bridge-

Aggregate3 interface in the IRF logical switch.

The test issued a shut down command under interface b3. From the display MAC address

command, we can see the traffic failed over to the other path.

Test Result:

 Shut down int b3: about 3-4 seconds packets loss.

 Undo shut int b3: about 1-2 seconds packets loss with “stp edged-port enable.” Without it, about

30 seconds of packet loss occurs due to the regular STP learning stage.

Note:

IRF convergence time is much faster than three seconds, typically less than 50 milliseconds. The

overall three second convergence time is related to Virtual Connect convergence around the smartlink

to notify the server link in the event of uplink downtime, which then triggers vSwitch to converge the

packet flow. Even with a regular switch without IRF (verified in the lab), three seconds is the expected

Virtual Connect/vSwitch convergence time in similar topology.