CCNP Routing and Switching ROUTE 300-101 Official Cert Guide

Spanning Tree Protocol Migration

Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), to which you were introduced in your CCNA studies, supports redundancy in a Layer 2 network, while preserving a loop-free topology. Several variants of STP have been developed since Radia Perlman’s first iteration of STP in the mid 1980s.

Typically, the optimal type of STP to run on today’s Cisco Catalyst switches is Rapid Per-VLAN Spanning Tree Protocol Plus (Rapid-PVST+). Rapid-PVST+ allows for much faster convergence (commonly, less than one second) as compared to the relatively slow convergence (up to 50 seconds) of IEEE 802.1D (the first industry-standard version of STP). Another benefit of running Rapid-PVST+ is that it allows each VLAN to run its own instance of STP, as opposed ...