PVST and VTP Pruning in production

typesh

Hey everyone..

Just had a question about PVST and VTP Pruning in production networks. As I am learning about PVST and VTP (vtp pruning and manually pruning vtp), I am realizing that this could get really complex once you want to take advantage of unused links (by assigning different root-switches to different vlans). If multiple VLANs are running over many switches in an enterprise, is VTP Pruning used, or would the manual pruning be used? Using the manual method seems like it could get hard to manage once there are many VLANs in place, as each VLAN could have a different root-switch in order to take advantage of unused links. Just curious as to approaches when there exists different root-switches per vlan.

dtlokee

It really depends on the design of the network but I usually prune everything manually and configure the switches as VTP transparent. If you are using the typical design of 2 distribution switches with links from each to the access layer it is managable to configure everyting manually, this would also be true if you are using L2 uplinks to 2 core switches from the distribution layer. As far as the interaction between pruning and spanning tree, you would not prune a trunk to an access layer switch differently on the redundant distribution layer switches, they would be the same and you would use switch priority to elect the appropriate uplink.