Managing lots of VLANS/Opts with CARP/HA

daystrom_matthew

Hi everyone

I've had a look around but haven't seen an obvious answer. I thought this would be a more common thing, but right now I've got ~75 VLANs in my homelab/home/etc. and I'd like to add a lot more, and be able to easily alter them semi-regularly.

Before the obvious questions, yes there are reasons I have this many. Yes when I show other network architects what's going on here I'm met with a mixture of horror, sadness, and wonder. Yes I have what could generously be called 'multiple sites' where I need layer 2 spanning them. Yes I have a lot of devices here...I've allocated out a decent chunk of a /16, though a lot of is naturally down to sparse allocation.

Anyway, adding and removing Opts/VLANs in the UI on multiple boxes when there are this many can very easily lead to situations where the boxes get out of sync with the Opt-VLAN assignment, so naturally the HA/CARP breaks. Usually this is because I delete the wrong Opt in one of the HA members and add the new one in without noticing and there's a shuffle of opt numbers and things get messy to undo...usually it's a config rollback and try again, but it's just so damned time consuming and fragile with no way of easily verifying things are ok in the UI till it breaks.

Right now my combersome hack to avoid breakage is to dump the two HA members' configs, add the VLANs and Opts manually in the xml, then reimport the config into the members one at a time. This has the annoying complication of needing to reboot each of the members in turn. As part of this I'm committing the cardinal sin of setting the opt numbers to something I can map back to a VLAN ID rather than just incrementing them. At least this way I can verify the right Opt is being modified as well as ensure I have matching configs on both sides via a diff.

My questions are:

Is there a better way to alter the VLAN/Opts? (I'm sure there would be)
Would it be possible to get an advanced option to let us view and alter the underlying Opt numbers in the web UI on the Interface Assignments page? That way I can add/modify Opts to the 'correct' value/remove the one with the number I'm after. If this is feasible who should I direct this support request too?
Am I asking the wrong questions and I really should be doing XYZ?

Thank you. I await your scorn, and hopefully helpful hints