Hello. We have the domain in the picture above running RSTP. Is there any way for the hosts on Switch 2 to access FW1 directly from SFP1? We tried adding a static host on SW2 with FW1’s MAC and SFP1 as egress port, but that actually crippled the whole system. It seems that our best bet would be to wait for MLAG and add dual NICs on the FWs, but that probably would take a long time.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
With RSTP, there is a single spanning tree for all VLANs. With MSTP, you can define an own spanning tree for each group of VLANs, but you still cannot have custom spanning trees for groups of hosts in the same VLAN. So if you can dedicate a VLAN for the hosts at SW2, you’ve got it.
You can also consider using mesh instead of bridge with spanning tree, but that means all traffic to be handled by CPU, no switch chip forwarding.