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APRIL 2008
MSTP INTEROPERABILITY OF THE DELL™ POWERCONNECT™ 6200 SERIES SWITCHES
WITH CISCO IOS AND CISCO CATOS-BASED SWITCHES
CONTROL PACKET BEHAVIOR
BPDU: Always transmitted as untagged. The port receives and transmits BPDUs in all three
MSTP states: Discarding, Learning and Forwarding. If MSTP is disabled for the device (manual
forwarding on all ports), BPDUs received are switched.
GVRP: Always transmitted as untagged. GVRP PDUs are received and transmitted only when
the port is in Forwarding state.
GMRP: GMRP PDUs are transmitted tagged or untagged as per the port’s tag setting. They
follow the ingress and egress rules.
LACPDU: LACPDUs are always transmitted untagged and are received and transmitted in all
three MSTP states. These frames are never switched whether MSTP is enabled or not.
Pause Frames: Pause frames are never tagged or switched. The port receives and transmits
Pause frames in all three MSTP states. In other words, the STP state of the port has no
bearing on the transmission and reception of Pause Frames.
Other Frames to and from the CPU: All other frames are received and transmitted only if the
port is in Forwarding state.
All BPDUs (ST, TCN, RST, MST, etc.) use the unique MAC address of the transmitting port in their
Source MAC address field and comply with IEEE Std. 802.1D-2004 sub-clauses 7.12 and 7.13.
The unique MAC address for a stacking switch is the base MAC address of the stack unit plus
the port number.
MSTP CLI COMMANDS
You can configure MSTP on the Dell PowerConnect 62xx series switch by using the Web
interface or the Command-Line Interface (CLI). The following spanning tree and MSTP CLI
commands are available:
spanning-tree
spanning-tree mode
spanning-tree forward-time
spanning-tree hello-time
spanning-tree max-age
spanning-tree priority
spanning-tree disable
spanning-tree cost
spanning-tree port-priority
spanning-tree portfast
spanning-tree link-type
clear spanning-tree detected-protocols
spanning-tree mst priority
spanning-tree mst max-hops
spanning-tree mst port-priority
spanning-tree mst cost
spanning-tree mst configuration
instance (mst)
name (mst)
revision (mst)
show (mst)
exit (mst)
abort (mst)
show spanning-tree
For more information about each command, including the syntax and variables, see the Dell
PowerConnect 62xx System CLI Command Reference.
Configure MSTP by using the Web interface on the pages under the Switching > Spanning
Tree menu.