Switch configuration backup using PowerShell

In this article, I will briefly explain how to backup running configuration of your Dell switches to a TFTP server location using PowerShell.

Prerequisites

• A TFTP server should be configured and running

Workflow

1. Get a list of IP address of switches that needs to be backed up
   
   list = Get-Content .\switch_list.txt
2. Collect credentials to SSH into the switch
   
   $creds = Get-Credential
3. Create a new SSH session to the first switch in the list
   
   $sw_ssh = New-SshSession -ComputerName 192.168.10.2 -Credential $creds -Force -ConnectionTimeout 300
4. Invoke the command to backup running config to TFTP server over the SSH session
   
   $filename =(Get-Date).tostring("dd-MM-yyyy-hh-mm-ss")
   $cmd_backup = "copy running-config tftp://192.168.11.33/sw01/$filename.txt"
   Invoke-sshcommand -Command $cmd_backup -SSHSession $sw_ssh
5. Repeat step 3 and 4 for all the switches in the list

Complete project reference

https://github.com/vineethac/dell_switch_backup

Note

You can schedule this PS script using a task scheduler so that the running configuration of switches can be backed up automatically on a daily basis or as per requirements.

Hope this was useful. Cheers!

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Cisco switch configuration backup using PowerShell

Virtual Link Trunking - VLT

VLT is a proprietary layer-2 link aggregation protocol developed by Force10 which allows users to setup aggregated links between end devices (servers) to two different physical switches. The main property is that after enabling VLT, the two physical switches will act as a single logical switch. This offers redundancy for the connection from server and balanced traffic to the core network eliminating packet loops. 

In dynamic link aggregation protocol like LACP, the connections from a server can be only be terminated to a single logical switch (it can be a single physical switch or multiple switches in a single stacked switch setup). There wont be any redundancy if the aggregated links terminate to a single physical switch and the disadvantage of a switch stack is that incase of maintenance or firmware update the whole stack needs to be taken offline causing downtime which is not practical in a production environment.

The VLT peers exchange and synchronize layer-2 related table details (MAC tables, IGMP states etc) among the whole VLT domain. Devices connected to the VLT domain could be either servers or switches as long as they support port channel (LAG, LACP etc). It is recommended to enable RSTP and configure bridge priorities. Prefer static LAG between VLT peers and LACP towards hosts/ switches.

Configuration steps:

1.Enable RSTP and configure bridge priority on peer VLT switches

2.Configure VLT interconnect (VLTi), static LAG between VLT switches

3.Configure VLT domain

4.Configure LACP for the connected device

5.Verify status

References: Dell TechCenter, Niktips blog

  

3 Node Hyper-V 2012 R2 Cluster Design

Below diagram shows a traditional 3 tier highly available cluster with 3 Hyper-V nodes and 2 shared storage nodes (storage in Active-Passive/ Active-Active mode) all connected via network switches.

Compute

*Hyper-V nodes are running on DELL PowerEdge R630 rack servers

Networking

*Shared storage is accessed via MPIO over two separate VLANs (61 and 62)

*VM traffic is over NIC teaming (Switch independent and dynamic)

*Live migration/ cluster network is also teamed together

Storage

*We are using DELL PowerEdge R320 with Open-E DSS V7 as storage nodes

*Each node has 8 x 10K SAS drives with RAID 5

*Storage can be either in Active-Passive/ Active-Active cluster mode

*In Active-Passive mode, only one of the storage nodes will be active. That means resources of only one storage node will be utilized at a time

*In Active-Active mode, both servers will be active and serving storage traffic 



Recommended BIOS settings for DELL PowerEdge 12G servers

BIOS settings for optimal performance

Memory mode : Optimizer
Node interleave : Disabled
Logical processor : Enabled
QPI frequency : Maximum frequency
CPU power management : Maximum performance
Turbo boost : Enabled
C1E : Disabled
C-states : Disabled
Memory frequency : Maximum performance