Cisco Press

Spanning Tree Protocol Concepts and Conguration

Date: Jul 13, 2011 By Sean Wilkins. Article is provided courtesy of Cisco Press.

When designing a switched network, one of the biggest issues that needs to be dealt with is loop
prevention. If a loop were to develop in a switched network, the amount of trac that could be
passed between switches would quickly utilize the entire bandwidth available within each of the
switches aected. One method to prevent loops is to only provide a single path between switches
and ensure that there is no path redundancy across the entire switched network. While this may
work in small deployments, when dealing with switched networks that are a bit larger the
deployment of redundancy is a required element. To be able to deal with these potential loops
that could be caused by these redundant paths the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) can be
deployed. STP is tasked with preventing loops throughout the switched network. It does this by
temporarily blocking redundant paths between switches; in this case, if the primary forwarding
path is disrupted, this blocking would be removed allowing trac to be passed. This article takes a
look at some of the basic STP concepts and reviews the conguration required to deploy STP on
a switch.

When designing a switched network, one of the biggest issues that must be dealt with is loop
prevention. If a loop were to develop in a switched network, the amount of trac that could be
passed between switches would quickly utilize the entire bandwidth available within each of the
switches aected. One method to prevent loops is to only provide a single path between switches
and ensure that there is no path redundancy across the entire switched network. While this may
work in small deployments, when dealing with switched networks that are a bit larger the
deployment of redundancy is a required element.

To be able to deal with these potential loops that could be caused by these redundant paths the
Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) can be deployed. STP is tasked with preventing loops throughout the
switched network. It does this by temporarily blocking redundant paths between switches; in this
case, if the primary forwarding path is disrupted, this blocking would be removed allowing trac to
be passed. This article takes a look at some of the based STP concepts and reviews the
conguration required to deploy STP on a switch.

Spanning Tree Protocol Concepts

The rst thing to point out is that this article focuses on the original version of STP that is covered in
IEEE 802.1D; some of the material about the newer Rapid STP (RSTP-IEEE 802.1w) will also be
briey discussed.

The basic function of STP is to provide a loop free switched network; this is done by creating a
topology of all participating STP switches. The best loop free path through the switched network is
then determined from this topology information. The initial step taken by each STP is to elect a root
switch; the root switch is used as a central point in a switched network to determine the best route
through the switched network. Initially, all switches act as if they are the root switch and do this until
they receive trac from another superior switch (as determined by switch priority); this is referred to
as a root switch election.

Another thing that must be understood is that multiple root switches can exist in the network
depending on what STP mode is being used. By default, on Cisco switching equipment, each VLAN
has its own STP instance and a root switch is elected for each VLAN; this mode is called Per VLAN
Spanning Tree Plus (PVST+). If implementing RSTP, Rapid PVST+ is used.

Spanning Tree Protocol Port Roles

Once the root switch is elected, each of the ports is given a role depending on its place within the
STP topology; the available port roles when using 802.1D spanning tree are shown below:

Root—The port given this role is the selected best path to reach the root switch
Designated—The port given this role is selected with the best path to a specic switched
segment; there is only one designated port per switched segment.
Alternate—The port given this role is selected as a backup to the root port; if the root port
should have a problem, this port would take over the root port role.
Backup—The port given this role is selected as a back to the designated port; if the designated
port should have a problem this port would take over the designated port role.

Once the best path is calculated and each of the ports has been given a role, all ports with the
alternate or backup STP roles will be blocked to prevent loops.

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 Spanning Tree Protocol Interface States

Each of the ports on a switch that are enabled participates in STP; each of these ports goes through
a process of interface states before they are allowed to forward trac. The sequence of 802.1D
interface states is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Spanning Tree States (802.1D)

As shown in Figure 1, there are ve dierent states that a port can be in, described below:

Blocking State—Ports that are in the blocking state do not forward trac; they simply listen to
the network to ensure that they should continue to block trac. Should the state of the
switched network change, the port could transition to listening state. All ports start in blocking
state after initial switch initialization.
Listening State—Ports that are in the listening state do not forward trac. While in this state,
the port will only listen to trac as they did when in blocking state. This is the rst state that
comes after the blocking state after the port is set to start frame forwarding. The default time
in the listening state is 15 seconds.
Learning State—Ports that are in the learning state do not forward trac; while in this state the
port will listen to trac and begin to learn addresses from the connected devices on a
segment. The default time in the learning state is 15 seconds.
Forwarding State—Ports that are in the forwarding state forward trac as well as continue to
learn addresses from the segment.
Disabled State—Ports that are in the disabled state do not forward trac or listen to the
network trac.

When implementing the RSTP, the time that a port takes to transition and the method used to
transition has changed. This provides the ability for a switched network to begin forwarding trac
sooner without unneeded delays; these delays are a common complaint about the 802.1D version of
STP.

Spanning Tree Protocol Conguration

By default, STP is enabled on VLAN 1 and all newly created VLAN’s; because of this there are no
commands required to enabled STP on a newly initialized switch. If for some reason an older switch
has STP disabled on a specic VLAN, the commands shown in Table 1 are used to re-enable STP.

Table 1: Enabling STP

Step 1 Enter privileged mode. router>enable

Step 2 Enter global conguration mode. router#congure terminal
Step 3 Enable STP on a VLAN. router(cong)#spanning-tree vlan vlan-id
Step 4 Exit conguration mode. router(cong)#end

When initially setting up STP, it is best to determine which of the switches on the network will
become the root switch. While it is possible for the network to determine this by itself, the election
will simply come down to a question of who has the lowest MAC address. By default, each switch
begins with a priority of 32768; this priority is then combined with the MAC address of the switch to
create the bridge ID. During a root switch election, the switch with the lowest bridge ID will be
elected the root switch.

The commands to determine the root switch are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Root Switch Selection

Step 1 Enter privileged mode. router>enable

Step 2 Enter global conguration mode. router#congure terminal
Step 3 Set the switch to become the router(cong)#spanning-tree vlan vlan-id root
root switch. primary

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 This command determines the
switch priority required to make
the switch root and changes the
switch priority to this number.
Step 3 Set the switch to become the router(cong)#spanning-tree vlan vlan-id root
secondary root switch. secondary

This command changes the

priority of the switch to 28672.
Step 3 Set the switch priority, as the router(cong)#spanning-tree vlan vlan-id priority
default switch priority is 32768 priority
any value less then this will make
the switch root.

It is recommended that this

command not be used in favor of
the earlier commands.
Step 4 Exit conguration mode router(cong)#end

If the default Spanning Tree mode needs to be changed from the default of PVST+, use the
commands shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Spanning Tree Mode

Step 1 Enter privileged mode. router>enable

Step 2 Enter global conguration mode. router#congure terminal
Step 3 Congure the Spanning Tree router(cong)#spanning-tree mode {pvst | rapid-
mode to use. pvst}
Step 4 Exit conguration mode. router(cong)#end

Summary
STP is one of those protocols that are used by most people without them even knowing that it exists,
but without it modern switched networks could not operate. Hopefully the contents of this article
have been able to introduce the concepts used by STP to eliminate switch loops and how STP can
be congured to get the best performance out of the network.

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