Brocade BigIron RX Series Configuration Guide - Manual (Page 483)

BigIron RX Series Configuration Guide 405
53-1002484-04
Chapter
14
Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) Phase 1 and 2
In this chapter
• Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) phase 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
• MRP rings without shared interfaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
• Ring initialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
• How ring breaks are detected and healed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
• Master VLANs and customer VLANs in a topology group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
• Configuring MRP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
• MRP phase 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
• Ring initialization for shared interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
• Using MRP diagnostics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
• Displaying MRP information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
• MRP CLI example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) phase 1
MRP Phase 1 is a Brocade proprietary protocol that prevents Layer 2 loops and provides fast
reconvergence in Layer 2 ring topologies. It is an alternative to STP and is especially useful in
Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) where using STP has the following drawbacks:
• STP allows a maximum of seven nodes. Metro rings can easily contain more nodes than this.
• STP has a slow reconvergence time, taking many seconds or even minutes. MRP can detect
and heal a break in the ring in sub-second time.
Figure 63 shows an MRP metro ring.