Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Looking for opinion on Aruba configuration

I'm planning for a replacement of the switching in our main office. If it helps, the current setup (which was in place when I arrived) is a single Nexus 5548UP with six 2248TP fabric extenders providing all of the access. I'm aware this isn't a recommended config as the FEXes are meant for TOR and there should be a second 5548UP for redundancy. Here's what I'm planning so far.

Core 2 x Aruba 3810M (JL075)

Access 5x Aruba 2930M (JL321A) - basic 48-port 1G 1x Aruba 2930M (JL324A) - 24-port smart-rate

The plan for the core is to bring in our to-be-installed replacement three virtual hosts and new SAN, as well as two of our main file servers, all operating at 10G with redundant connections. The virtual hosts and SAN would be segregated to a separate iSCSI VLAN and redundant connections would go into each 3810M from all devices.
The plan would be to stack the 2930Ms and run 40G uplinks from either end of the stack to the 3810Ms. The JL324A is mixed into the JL321As because we wish to have the ability to run a portion of the client devices at speeds greater than 1G to improve Autodesk Revit shared model performance.

I've installed my share of Cisco gear, but this is my first foray into Aruba and I have a few questions about this design. 1. I believe it's the case (but I can't seem to find anything to definitively state it) that the JL324A can be added to a stack of JL321As. Can anyone confirm? 2. For Aruba stacked devices, when new firmware is released, does the stack as a whole get updated at once or is each device updated separately? 3. For the 3810M core, since my desire is for each switch to be fully redundant, would it make more sense to not stack them together? My thought is that during switch maintenance when updates to the switches are applied, the individual switches could be restarted without having to bring down anything such as the SAN or the virtual hosts.
I'm open to comments on the above or any other observations.



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