N4032 Switch Only

Question

Hi All,

Probably simple to do, but darned if I can't figure it out. I have 10GB 4032 switch. I have 4gb lag setup over to my main Cisco router.

I basically want this to be a switch, not a router so that anything plugged into its ports will use the Cisco for routing, unless of course for devices attached to the 10gb ports. Is it as simple as disable routing? And if so, how will that affect the IP address on vlan1 for accessing the switch. Obviously don't want to lose access to that.

I also have several devices on it that are tagged with vlans and need those to end up over on the cisco too (that have the vlans defined) unless there's a device on the 10gb also tagged with the same vlan....

Also, is there any way to tag the OOB port to a vlan?

Thanks,

-Bob

DELL-Stefan R · Answer

Hi Bob.

Let me answer your question about the OOB port first with an article I found:

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000120183/how-to-set-up-management-access-for-dell-networking-n2000-n3000-and-n4000-series-switches

"It is recommended when using a VLAN to manage your network, to make a separate VLAN just for management. This separates management traffic from your data traffic. This not only helps with performance but also slightly increases security. You can manage the switch through any reachable VLAN IP address."

Hope this answers the question.

Regarding the configuration, well this is not easy to answer for me. Have you already checked the documents we provide for the N4k series?

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/networking-n4000-series/docs

If this does not help, you might consider receiving exclusive configuration support. You can reach out to our sales department in order to book it.

Or just wait if someone else on the forum has an idea on how to manage it.

Best regards
Stefan

Bob916 · Answer

Hi Stefan,

Yes, we already have an internal vlan for management. We ended up getting rid of all IP configs and disabling routing on the N4032. The OOB port is on our mgt vlan.

Anyways, back to the vlan issue. We basically want this switch to be L2 only. We're having issues with vlans seeing systems in other vlans on the Cisco side. When the system is on an esxi host that's on the cisco side it can ping all the other vlans fine. But when we migrate the VM to an esxi host whose primary nic is on the N4032 it can no longer see other vlans and visa-versa and our network monitoring starts reporting the system is down. We've removed all lag stuff to simplify the connection down to a single x-connect trunk port. We found this article on Dell that seems to apply to this issue:

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pwcnt/en/app_note_4.pdf

However, the Cisco 3750 does not have GRVP. I wish I'd known this in advance, it seems like we've purchased a fancy book-end and I'm going to go back and shop for a Cisco solution if we can't get this working by the weekend. We need to upgrade our internal network to 10gb and thought the N4032 would be a good solution. I'm not entirely sure that aritcle applies to us as it mentioned "dynamic vlans"? Not sure what that means. Since VMs can ping other systems in the same vlan across the switches (and external IPs), I think that's fine, they just can't see other vlans. Maybe this is more of a routing issue, but we've tried putting routes on the cisco with no luck.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Hi Bob, We should be able to make the configuration work. Where are the servers pointing for DNS? Where is the switch pointing? Are the ports connected to the servers trunk ports or access ports?

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

I mean for VLANs to communicate something needs to route between them, if this switch is going to be layer 2 only something else has to be layer 3 that they can communicate with. The vswitch on the hosts should be VLAN aware so the ports to the server can be trunk ports as well. Is there a default gateway set on the switch?

Bob916 · Answer

I'm not sure about the DNS question. All the VMs use our internal DNS servers. Which switch are you referring to and what do you mean by 'pointing'? We want L2 only. Initially we had it configured with a gateway of the Cisco router, that's our main router. Currently the x-connect is via a single trunk port. If we get it working, we'll LAG that into at least a 2gb x-connect.

Bob916 · Answer

I see, you mean a default gateway on the N4032? No, we removed that thinking L2 traffic is all we need and over the x-connect the VMs would reach their respective gateway on the Cisco. It appears after spinning up multi VMs on different vlans, this is only affecting one subnet that's on vlan1 by default which is what the cisco uses. I can tracert/ping from other vlans to other vlans, except for that one! So, narrowing it down to this one subnet. We're thinking there's some sort of conflict betwen the Cisco vlan1 and the Dell vlan1.

When I put a default gateway on the Dell I get this warning:

" Notice! The configured Default Gateway will not take effect until an interface belonging to the same subnet as the configured Gateway is created and activated."

I don't want an interface to have an IP address, that would make it layer 3.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

It might have something to do with it being the default vlan. Page 781 https://dell.to/2NUoNIQ

Networking General

N4032 Switch Only

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