New Training: Configure and Verify MST (Multiple STP)

In this 9-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Keith Barker teaches you how to configure and verify MST (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol) in a Cisco network. Watch this new Cisco training.

Watch the full course: Cisco CCNP Enterprise Core

This training includes:

• 9 videos

• 1.5 hours of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Intro to Multiple Spanning Tree

• Load Balancing with STP

• Reducing Overhead with MST

• MST Planning and Configuration

• MST Root Modification

• BPDUs in an MST Region

• MST Regions Connecting to Non-MST Switches

• Spanning Tree Challenge Lab

• Spanning Tree Challenge Lab Walk-through

Spanning Tree for VLANs and Multiple Spanning Tree for STP

Spanning Tree Protocol, or STP, is a technical solution to a complex problem. If you’re trying to develop a network map and you’ve set up certain ports and endpoints to loop back on themselves to provide failover stability, you could accidentally create a never-ending loop where the network keeps circling back on itself trying to find the network each port belongs to.

Now scale up that problem a hundredfold. At the enterprise level, you might be operating several hundred VLANs, and while they’re all running merrily along, you can still run into problems when they try to speak to one another and form one contiguous Autonomous System. Even if the network can be mapped adequately, you might still be running hundreds of different instances of spanning tree and wasting tons of CPU cycles and memory.

And that’s where Multiple Spanning Tree comes in. Instead of calculating a spanning tree of each and every VLAN you’re operating, you can use instances onto which VLANs get mapped. The core idea is simple enough, but in reality MST involves regions, attributes and much more to keep VLANs working.