I just recently purchased the 2 x 2724 and 2 x 2716 PowerConnect switches for obvious reasons.  They seem to be running great except for  one problem I seem to be having Interconnecting the switches such that the VLANs I have are correctly spanning all the switches because most traffic traverses between switches for the same VLAN but it seems that complete communication between switches on the same VLAN does not happen.  I am used to Nortel Baystack switches and their function/feature of "InterSwitch" ports.  I have done this on the PowerConnect switches but I seem to be having a very weird problem that I can not figure out.

 

My configuration:

2724 with the following VLANs: 1, 101, 202, 301, 401

ports 23 and 24 under VLAN Port settings are set to PVID 1 and under VLAN Membership these ports are Tagged for all the VLANs

ports 1-4 are set to lets say VLAN 202 with 1 and 2 setup on the LAN side of a pair of redundant firewalls and 3 and 4 setup to a pair of servers

 

2716 with the exact same configuration as above with the exception of ports 23 and 24 being 15 and 16

ports 1-4 are setup to servers

 

My problem:

Between these 2 switches VLAN 202 for instance can ping devices on the other switch with the same VLAN but some RPC communication is not being forwarded between them ie. Active Directory Replication information.  The problem goes away if I connect the servers in the same VLANs to the SAME switch  To make matters worse ALL servers no matter what switch they are connected on that VLAN CAN connect to the firewall with no problems at all going in or out of the network.

 

My question is how exactly should I be setting up the Interswitch ports on these 2724 and 2716 switches?  Is my configuration incorrect?  Do these switches have limitations on doing this?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Roger