While installing an IBM BladeCenter H that had a Brocade Converged Enhanced Ethernet Switch module (IBM part# 61Y1909, Brocade model 8470) I found pretty much zero documentation on how to connect it to an external Cisco switch. So if you are trying to figure this out yourself, hopefully I can save you the trouble.
On the Cisco switch, I had 2 x 10Gb ports connected to the Brocade. The config on those ports is as follows:
interface TenGigabitEthernet1/5 description -- Connected to Brocade CEE SW01 -- switchport trunk native vlan 111 switchport mode trunk channel-protocol lacp channel-group 2 mode active end interface TenGigabitEthernet1/6 description -- Connected to Brocade CEE SW01 -- switchport trunk native vlan 111 switchport mode trunk channel-protocol lacp channel-group 2 mode active end
I wanted to use LACP to bond these two ports together, partly for throughput (which shouldn’t really be an issue 10Gb networking) and partly for redundancy – as you can see the ports are members of a channel group. The port channel interface config is:
interface Port-channel2 description -- Connected to Brocade CEE SW01 -- switchport switchport trunk native vlan 111 switchport mode trunk end
Note the native vlan statement – I specifically wanted VLAN1 traffic passed to the Brocade, but the Brocade expects all VLANs to be tagged. The work-around for this was to create a dummy VLAN (VLAN111) and make this the native vlan. This then ensures VLAN1 will be tagged :)
Now for the Brocade side of the configuration. First, the internal 10Gb ports will need to be configured as follows:
interface InTengigabitEthernet 0/1 fcoeport switchport switchport mode trunk switchport trunk allowed vlan all no shutdown
The two external ports are configured as follows:
interface ExTengigabitEthernet 0/15 channel-group 2 mode active type standard no shutdown lacp timeout long interface ExTengigabitEthernet 0/16 channel-group 2 mode active type standard no shutdown lacp timeout long
Note you will need to issue a “no switchport” command before you can configure the channel group. Now for the port channel interface itself:
interface Port-channel 2 switchport switchport mode trunk switchport trunk allowed vlan all no shutdown
While there may be a better way to do it, this is the configuration worked for me and with the lack of documentation on Cisco interoperability I wasn’t going to burn any more time on it. I know you can set the Cisco switch to not have a default VLAN, like the Brocade, but this would have meant reworking a lot of the Cisco side of the network which I didn’t want to do.