we're sharing a server room with another company, including the network infrastructure. All the switches are HP ProCurve, in various models depending on port need and so on. We're using VLANs to separate traffic to various virtual servers
Problem description:
We have six switches in two racks, where one in each rack is used for management (ILO, IPMI and so on), and the other two are set up for redundancy. Let's call them A, B and C, and D, E and F. A and D are the management switches. B is connected to E, and C to F, and there is a trunk between B and C where all our VLANs are supposed to be transported. In addition, E and F has similar trunks to the main switches, these trunks only allow a few VLANs with public traffic.
The STP designated root is in one of the main “backbone” switches on the outside of E and F, and of course, to avoid loops, that root switch has disabled the trunk between B and C. The result is of course that traffic on our internal networks can't reach all the switches, and then hilarity ensues.
Question:
Is it reasonable to enable root-guard on the trunk ports on E and F, on both sides of the trunks, to create a situation with two root switches? Hopefully this would mean that the root switch on the inside of the root-guard will be aware of all the VLANs that the root switch on the outside isn't.
As far as I can tell, HP doesn't support per-VLAN STP. Are there other solutions I should consider here, preferably ones which wouldn't require new hardware or huge amounts of downtime to implement.