Comware

I have four HPE 6405. At the moment, two of them are the core of my LAN On them VRRP is configured in order to route traffic among 16 vlans and from the core the to the border router.

I would like set up them in order to use MLAGs to connect of some children switches. I already have a successfully test bed with the ISL between two 8360.

About the routing, the documentation suggests to use the active gateway configuration instead of the VRRP. Unfortunately, if I understood correctly, there is a contraint regarding the  virtual mac-address number,  "Only 15 VMACs are supported on 6400 switch series".

This limit seems not sufficient in order to migrate the current configuration to the active gateway over the vsx scheme.
Moreover, in the future I would like add more VLANs and it is not clear to me, what would happen when propagating on these VLANs ipv6 too.

Questions:

Could I use the active gateway only for a subset of VLANs and leave the other under the VRRP configuration? So that one of 6405 should be  in the VRRP state active and the other one in standby.

Perhaps, is it a better the sub-optimal choice to leave the routing for all VLANs under the VRRP configuration? 

Ciao Nazzareno, the statement you're referring to ("Only 15 VMACs are supported on 6400 switch series") should be seen after reading that "The scope of this VMAC is purely link-local. Consequently, the same Virtual MAC address value can be used on all L3 VLAN interfaces (SVIs)." (implying that each AG configuration - related to each SVI the AG is created for - can share the same VMAC). As example I'm using the same AG VMAC on more than twenty AGs.

The meaning and usage of VMAC is very well explained on the HPE HPE VSX Configuration Best Practices (Technical Note) - HPE Aruba Networking CX Switches (Revision 2.0 – June 2025) (attached) and, clearly, also on the usual ArubaOS-CX VSX guide for the specific AOS-CX software version your switches are running.

Here page 46:

Attachment(s)

HPE_a00094242en_us_VSX_Configuration_Best_Practices_for_H...pdf   9.27 MB 1 version