An engineer must design a large Layer 2 domain that contains hundreds of switches and VLANs. The engineer's primary goals are to: - Efficiently utilize the bandwidth of all links - Avoid Layer 2…

The correct answer is C. MST. MST (Multiple Spanning Tree, IEEE 802.1s) is the correct choice for a large Layer 2 domain with hundreds of switches and VLANs. MST maps multiple VLANs into a limited number of STP instances (MST instances), dramatically reducing the per-switch CPU and memory overhead compared…

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Question

An engineer must design a large Layer 2 domain that contains hundreds of switches and VLANs. The engineer's primary goals are to:

Efficiently utilize the bandwidth of all links
Avoid Layer 2 loops
Cause minimal impact on switch CPU and memory

Which technology should the engineer include in the design?

Options

APVST+
BRapid PVST+
CMST
DRSTP

How the community answered

(57 responses)

A
11% (6)
B
25% (14)
C
61% (35)
D
4% (2)

Explanation

MST (Multiple Spanning Tree, IEEE 802.1s) is the correct choice for a large Layer 2 domain with hundreds of switches and VLANs. MST maps multiple VLANs into a limited number of STP instances (MST instances), dramatically reducing the per-switch CPU and memory overhead compared to per-VLAN STP. It still provides loop prevention (like all STP variants) and supports load balancing across links by assigning different VLANs to different instances. PVST+ (A) runs a separate STP instance per VLAN-with hundreds of VLANs this creates massive CPU/memory consumption on every switch. Rapid PVST+ (B) improves convergence speed but retains the per-VLAN instance overhead, making it unscalable for hundreds of VLANs. RSTP (D) is a single-instance protocol that is not VLAN-aware and cannot load-balance traffic across multiple VLANs without additional configuration.

Topics

#MST#Spanning Tree Protocol#Layer 2 Design#Network Efficiency

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