HP Procurve VTP equivalent

DaveKall42
DaveKall42 used Ask the Experts™
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Is there an equivalent of VTP protocol in HP switches for propagation of VLANs?
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Scott GorcesterCTO
Commented:
No support for VTP as its a Cisco proprietaory protocol, but there is support for GVRP GARP VLAN Registration Protocol. HP's recommendation however was not to use it unless ports were authenticated due to the possibility of a user being able to added themselves to a VLAN that they shouldn't be in, as GVAP will map all VLANs to all uplinks and all switches with GVRP enable. Also best practice would be that you restrict VLANs only to the uplinks that require them.

Scott Gorcester MCITP
DaveKall42

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Commented:
So it really isn't the same thing it sounds like. Have you ever used it?
Datacenter Technician
Top Expert 2012
Commented:
It was supposed to be that GVRP gets the same functionality as VTP, but IEEE somehow managed to make it so 'universal' that it became kind of useless.

On most HP switches the VLANs are not permanently stored after being learned, and the client ports were expected to be dynamically assigned to vlans, either by 802.1x or the client station actively participating in GVRP. It was supposed to support pruning based on client vlan assignments as well.
Also, they didn't define any security on it, not even a simple password, which makes it pretty dangerous.

So while in theory it does exist and in large enterprises (with 802.1x) it can work, in a mid- to small sized network you're better off automating vlan creation by scripting or something.

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