Bridge Id, Switch Priority, And Extended System Id; Spanning-Tree Timers - Cisco 2950G 24 - Catalyst Switch Software Configuration Manual

Understanding Spanning-Tree Features
BPDUs contain information about the sending switch and its ports, including switch and MAC
addresses, switch priority, port priority, and path cost. Spanning tree uses this information to elect the
root switch and root port for the switched network and the root port and designated port for each
switched segment.

Bridge ID, Switch Priority, and Extended System ID

The IEEE 802.1D standard requires that each switch has an unique bridge identifier (bridge ID), which
determines the selection of the root switch. Because each VLAN is considered as a different logical
bridge with PVST+, the same switch must have as many different bridge IDs as VLANs configured on
it. Each VLAN on the switch has a unique 8-byte bridge ID; the two most-significant bytes are used for
the switch priority, and the remaining six bytes are derived from the switch MAC address.
In Release 12.1(9)EA1 and later, Catalyst 2950 switches support the 802.1T spanning-tree extensions,
and some of the bits previously used for the switch priority are now used as the VLAN identifier. The
result is that fewer MAC addresses are reserved for the switch, and a larger range of VLAN IDs can be
supported, all while maintaining the uniqueness of the bridge ID. As shown in
previously used for the switch priority are reallocated into a 4-bit priority value and a 12-bit extended
system ID value equal to the VLAN ID. In earlier releases, the switch priority is a 16-bit value.
Table 11-1 Switch Priority Value and Extended System ID
Switch Priority Value
Bit 16 Bit 15 Bit 14
32768 16384 8192
Spanning tree uses the extended system ID, the switch priority, and the allocated spanning-tree MAC
address to make the bridge ID unique for each VLAN. With earlier releases, spanning tree used one MAC
address per VLAN to make the bridge ID unique for each VLAN.
Support for the extended system ID affects how you manually configure the root switch, the secondary
root switch, and the switch priority of a VLAN. For more information, see the
Switch" section on page
"Configuring the Switch Priority of a VLAN" section on page

Spanning-Tree Timers

Table 11-2
Table 11-2 Spanning-Tree Timers
Variable Description
Hello timer Determines how often the switch broadcasts hello messages to other switches.
Forward-delay timer Determines how long each of the listening and learning states last before the interface begins
forwarding.
Maximum-age timer Determines the amount of time the switch stores protocol information received on an interface.
Catalyst 2950 Desktop Switch Software Configuration Guide
11-4
Extended System ID (Set Equal to the VLAN ID)
Bit 13 Bit 12 Bit 11 Bit 10
4096 2048 1024 512
11-12,
describes the timers that affect the entire spanning-tree performance.
Bit 9 Bit 8 Bit 7
256 128 64
"Configuring a Secondary Root Switch" section on page
Chapter 11
Table 11-1, the two bytes
Bit 6 Bit 5 Bit 4 Bit 3
32 16 8 4
"Configuring the Root
11-18.
Configuring STP
Bit 2 Bit 1
2 1
11-14, and
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