HP H3C 9500 Chassis Software Upgrade

[Peter Nguyen]

Has anyone using HP H3C chassis?  I just replaced my first two 8600s with two HP H3C 9512s.
 
I upgraded software from version 12 to version 13:  Chassis refused to work with its own Gbics, so, another upgrade to version 16 (not sure why they skip 14, and 15.  Probably they discovered bugs early and removed them quickly from the download), which H3C promises to fix the Gbics’ compatibility issue, but the firmware was probably hardcoded to the CPU; chassis still not recognized its own Gbics.  H3C just came up with another upgrade version 17 try to fix the “16 fails to fix 13”, still crossing my fingers...

The scary part: version 12 to version 17, five major upgrades (not counting the minor updates in between with R1, 2, 3…) in just less than two months; another scary part: Google the problem and found nothing!!!


Peter

[Michael McNamara]

Hi Peter,

It looks like a great product on paper... very interesting how HP acquired H3C to wage war with Cisco.

I believe it's a pretty new switch and it seems that H3C is still maintaining their branding, which is confusing to me. I know a lot of organizations that utilize HP in the closet and at the edge but usually utilize something else for their core.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure you'll find many folks here running H3C, although you never know, but I'm excited to here opinions and/or feedback on other manufacturers. Keep us in the loop (if you don't mind) regarding your deployment.

Good Luck!

[Peter Nguyen]

They said if you count the number of switchports, H3C is surpassing many manufacturers.  I found it is hard to believe, but the prices are so attractive and the IRF technology is amazing when it works (think like stacking of two to four chassis cores). 

The HP chassis support is not up to par plus many bugs in the software.  They did not do a good thorough test before release.  The funny thing is the 9500 chassis feel like 8600 (or maybe I miss 8600 so much), flash card is the same; I can find in H3C almost every functions or protocols that is compatible with 8600.  I have used some old tricks with 8600 to fix H3C problems: At recent upgrade, weird slowness problem that escalated to the third level support with no resolution.  Then I remembered same problem back then with 8600: formatting the flash, problem solved!

I’ll keep you post with the deployment.  We are at “plug and pray” stage now!

Peter

[Peter Nguyen]

H3C spanning-tree is MST by default.  It supposes to backward compatible with RSTP, but it does not seem to play well with RSTP or Nortel STPG even after the H3C chassis convert to RSTP.  So for spanning-tree to work, I have to convert all Avaya 5500 spanning-tree to MST and change all ports but the uplink to “edge-port” 

SW4(config)#spanning-tree mode mst
SW4(config-if)#spanning-tree mstp edge-port