TravelingPacket – A blog of network musings

I recently installed quite a few Brocade 6450 switches. Great switches by the way, easy to use, very full CLI, great hardware. Most of Brocades (given its a L3 switch) switches support both routing code and switching code. I mostly deploy the Routing code, just my preference. But, in this scenario the 6450 was being deployed for a very small classroom, and no need to setup the routing interface, etc. so the instructions are for a switch running Switching code – you can check VIA show version command.

In this case we have a very specific vlan for management of networking gear, so I need the IP/GW to be on the vlan – in this case vlan 255. Below is how

Lets first create the vlan in CLI:

config t

vlan 255 name MGMT
 tagged ethe 1/2/1   (My uplink port)
 management-vlan
 ip address 10.44.255.100 255.255.255.0
 default-gateway  10.44.255.1 1

Lets run over a few things here.

• First the vlan has to be tagged on a port, or untagged to actually show up in the config. Here I am tagging my uplink port 1/2/1
• The management-vlan command has to be used on the Vlan you want for management, otherwise its the default vlan setup in the switch which by default is 1.
• the default gateway commands needs the metric of the IP at the end. You can specify a value from 1 – 5. There is no default. The software uses the gateway with the lowest metric.