Switch priority by VLAN vs by Switch

[sc27racer]

The procedure to set the priority of switches so that traffic flows by default to a primary switch is well documented. However, with non-Meraki switches--including Cisco Traditional--one can also set switch priority per VLAN, to steer some VLANs to one switch and some to one or more others, which can help optimize traffic handling in some use cases. Is there a way to set switch priority by VLAN in Meraki networks? If not, is there a workaround for directing different kinds of traffic to different switches?

[NolanHerring]

Fairly certain Meraki does not have that.

See here: https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Deployment_Guides/Advanced_MS_Setup_Guide

MSTP (802.1s)
MSTP is an expansion of RSTP and adds a per-VLAN spanning tree instance to make use of better paths on each VLAN. MSTP is fully compatible with RSTP bridges, in that an MSTP BPDU can be interpreted by an RSTP bridge as an RSTP BPDU. Meraki switches do not support MSTP but are compatible and will see all MSTP instances as a single RSTP region.

PVST/PVST+
This is a Cisco proprietary protocol on Catalyst/Nexus switches that is compatible with Spanning tree (802.1D). It is important to note however that because PVST/PVST+ is a multi-VLAN spanning tree protocol, in order for the MS series switches to participate in spanning tree a spanning tree instance must be running on VLAN 1 of all switches and VLAN 1 is allowed on all trunk ports running PVST+ so that BPDUs are seen by the Meraki switches in the topology. Connecting an MS series to an existing switch fabric running PVST+ will force the MS series switch(es) to run in legacy mode (STP) which can increase convergence time. In this configuration, the MS series switches should never be the STP Root Bridge.

Rapid-PVST
This is a Cisco proprietary protocol on Catalyst/Nexus switches that is compatible with Spanning tree (802.1D) and RSTP (802.1w). It is important to note however that because Rapid-PVST is a multi-VLAN spanning tree protocol, in order for the MS series switches to participate in spanning tree a spanning tree instance must be running on VLAN 1 of all switches and VLAN 1 is allowed on all trunk ports running Rapid-PVST so that BPDUs are seen by the Meraki switches in the topology. In this configuration, the MS series switches should never be the STP Root Bridge.

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

@NolanHerring  is on the money.  Meraki uses the standards based single instance STP.  So you can't have a per-vlan setting.

[Roger_Beurskens]

Isn't Meraki using the rapid varint of STP?

RSTP?

Doesn't change anything in the inutial "issue" but works a little bit different.

Implementing MST or some variant of PVST would be nice to split traffic over interfaces to the best switch ( where the routing point of that vlan is)