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In the beginning, there were switches. And connected to these switches were servers, routers and other pieces of gear. These devices ran one application, or at a stretch, multiple applications on the same operating system and thus IP stack. It was very much one-server-per-port; the SQL Server was always on port 0/8, and shutting down port 0/8 would affect only that machine.
This is no longer true, as network engineers well know. Physical hardware no longer dictates what, where, and how servers and other workloads exist. Cloud computing, multi-tenant virtual infrastructures and dynamically reallocated virtual resources mean that one port can cover 20 or 200 servers. Conversely, link aggregation and other forms of port density protocols mean that one server can have fault-tolerant aggregated links across one, five or 50 ports.
A new way of looking at switching—as a logical, rather than physical, topology—is required. In this view, switches aren’t so much pieces of the network architecture themselves, but simply ports that can be used to set up much more complex logical links. This article will focus on two main concepts: routing protocols (to allow better utilization of underutilized switching links) and switching protocols such as STP (those used to Continue reading