What’s spanning-tree, what’s the goal of this protocol, the place does it work?These questions are straightforward to reply. Spanning-tree is a layer 2 ethernet loop prevention protocol which operates on Ethernet switches, there that is it, nothing else cease. That is all that spanning-tree does.Why do we’d like this protocol? Think about a community with two layer 1 hubs join collectively by way of a pair of Ethernet cables and a P.C related to every of the hubs. When both of the P.C’s sends any communication onto the wire the related hub will flood the info out of each interfaces in direction of the opposite hub, the receiving hub will then ahead the acquired communications to the P.C and again round to the opposite interface again to the unique hub, this communication will proceed across the community till one of many hyperlinks are eliminated, this is called a loop, typically additionally referred to a broadcast storm.
Broadcast storms are deadly your community resulting in outages for each voice and knowledge. We not use hubs on trendy networks, we usually make use of switches because of their performance and options, the one main characteristic of a layer 2 change is spanning-tree.Now think about the identical community as described above with two switches as a substitute of two hubs. Now moderately than all 4 ports being within the forwarding state spanning tree will decide by way of varied elections and weightings to dam a single port in our little topology, now when both of the P.C’s related to the switches ship a broadcast onto the wire there’ll not be any looping site visitors because of the blocked port.Now we have to find out how spanning-tree decides which port or ports it has to dam to stop a loop or loops from occurring on our community.The very first thing to do to grasp spanning tree is to think about this, you allow your home to bought to the workplace, on the junction on the high of the highway you cease, do you flip left, proper or go straight on?, your choice as to which path to decide on is made primarily based in your data of the situation of the workplace.
STP works in the very same means, spanning-tree will elect a tool to behave as a reference level, this reference level shall be marketed throughout to different spanning-protocols on different switches, when a change receives the reference level on multiple port it should resolve which port is extra preferable primarily based on hyperlink values similar to hyperlink bandwidth, port precedence and port quantity. As soon as the switches within the community resolve which ports to ahead and which to dam STP has carried out it is job.