STP and RSTP: how?

Question

System administration

There is a gigabit ring (so far broken in one place), each node has a managed switch. The task is to make a ring out of them. What is needed for that?
What is the first thing to do, close the ring physically or turn on RSTP on all switches?
At what point will I lose remote access to them?
How to do it all without running to each point as much as possible? Switches are predominantly HP, H3C, 3COM.

Answer 1

1. In general, it's better to do nothing at all on different vendors - a mono-vendor network is always more predictable.
2. By your actions. First you start building the RSTP tree. If the network is large, it is better to do this at the moments of minimum network load, usually 5-6 o'clock in the morning. You may be out of control for a certain period of time (spanning tree building period) - but don't worry, after building the tree, the connection will be restored.
3. Set weights everywhere, BridgeID and specify access ports - this is IMPORTANT! If you don’t set access ports and your switches will look at BPDU packets from these ports, then according to the law of meanness, it’s necessary to appear on the network m ... duck who plugs a managed switch into an access port, and a new rebuilding of the tree begins, and you have a headache from thoughts chegozh whole network sausage.
4. Connect the ring, there should be no rebuilding of the tree (did you do step 3?). If, after connecting the ring, the sausage and the rebuilding of the tree began - check whether you did item 3
correctly. If the network is small, then it is enough from point 3 to register access ports on the switches. The tree will be built quickly and without specifying weights.

Answer 2

HP, H3C, 3COM

On equipment from different manufacturers, it may not take off at all

Answer 3

Assemble the stand and test how it will work with each other.
Set up first then connect
Better RSTP

Answer 4

See also ERPS support on your hardware.
Of the benefits, a very short convergence time (~ 50ms).
Hardly a minus, but you need to know that for "service traffic" you need to allocate a separate VLAN and all devices in the ring must support this protocol, because. he is LinkState.
D-Linka has a nice presentation on the topic.