Most of the environments I've supported have used Cisco switches and I've always requested “spanning-tree portfast trunk”. The environment I support now use chassis switching from a different vendor. I was wondering if that vendors equivilant command would still be considered a best practice on these switches? Are there any additional or alternate trunk port configuration settings recommended for these switches?
STP is used to accomplish a loop-free environment. Every time a port state goes up, STP calculation occurs. As the result of the calculation, the switch ports are either set to a forwarding or blocking state to prevent a traffic loop.
STP topology convergence has four states:
When STP convergence is initiated it forces all of the physical switches in the STP domain to dump their forwarding tables and relearn the STP topology and all MAC addresses. This process can take between 30-50 seconds. During this time, no user data passes through the port. Some user applications can time out during this period. Connectivity is restored when the STP domain completes this convergence. To prevent the 30-50 second loss of connectivity during STP convergence, perform one of these options: