Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.

I’m kind of fond of the HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 series switches. They are mostly no-nonsense and fairly nice to configure from the command line.