Posts Tagged ‘MSTP’
This post continues the previous article dedicated to MSTP operations inside a single region. Before reading any further, make sure you read and fully understand the first part of MSTP overview: MSTP Tutorial Part I: Inside a Region. The information there is critical to understand the new post.
The concept of CIST
As you remember, every MSTP region runs special instance of spanning-tree known as IST or Internal Spanning Tree (=MSTI0). This instance is active on all links inside a region and serves the purpose of disseminating STP topology information for other STP instances. As usual, IST has a root bridge, elected based on the lowest bridge ID (priority/MAC address). However, situation changes when you have different regions in the network (e.g. switches with different region names, different revisions, etc). When a switch detects BPDU messages sourced from another region on any link, it marks the link as MSTP boundary. On the figure below you can see two MSTP regions connected via two separate links (disregard the RSTP region for now).
Before we start with MSTP (Multiple Spanning Trees Protocol), I would like to note that this tutorial is going to be is divided in two parts. The first part describes how MSTP works inside a single region (the definition of the term will follow later). The second part is dedicated to MSTP region interaction with other regions and different STP protocols (IEEE STP, RSTP and Cisco PVST+).
First, a short history tour. In the beginning, there was IEEE STP protocol (OK, there also was DEC [the original] and IBM STP protocols, but those are real history), which was adapted for use with VLANs and 802.1q trunks. A single shared tree (sometimes called Mono Spanning Tree by Cisco, or more often – Common Spanning Tree – which is not quite correct) is used by all VLANs to prevent Layer 2 loops. The obvious drawback of this design is the impossibility to engineer VLAN traffic across redundant links: if a link is blocked, it is blocked for all VLANs. To overcome this, Cisco suggested its proprietary PVST/PVST+ solution, running a separate STP instance for each VLAN. This solution permits using different logical topology for each VLAN, effectively allowing for L2 traffic engineering. However, with the number of VLANs growing, PVST becomes a waste of switch resources and management burden, for the number of logical topologies is usually much smaller than the number of active VLANs.
As time passed, STP evolved into RSTP and Cisco answered with Rapid-PVST+: the fast STP, but with the same per-VLAN instance concept. The single spanning-tree instance used by IEEE and per-VLAN STP implemented by Cisco represents two poles in the space of possible solutions. Seeing the limitations of PVST approach, Cisco came with idea of decoupling the STP instance from a VLAN (they were tied together in PVST). The initial implementation was called MISTP (Multiple Instances Spanning Tree) and later evolved into new IEEE 802.1s standard called MSTP (Multiple Spanning Trees Protocol). As we would see later, this evolution process led to some terminology confusion, and small features mismatch between IEEE MSTP and Cisco MSTP implementation.
