MSTP Best Practice

[Brian-Ninefeldt]

I have a campus network with 63 FortiSwitches managed by a stack of 1101E Gates in an HA.

MSTP is running in it's default state other then I did lower the priority of the distribution switches I want to be the root bridge.

My question is what is the best way to setup MSTP? Right now I'm using instance 0 but I did see a MSTP best practice paper that suggested not using instance 0.  I have a single region and 68 Vlans. I would like to keep using instance 0 just because it's simple. I would appreciate any recommendations. 

[ebilcari · Accepted solution]

The instance 0 (IST) take importance when switches from different vendors are part of the network. If these are all FSW, I guess no changes are needed.

If you want better link utilization and if currently there are uplinks (10Gbps) that are not being used (Alternate) or not using MCLAG, you can carefully spread the VLANs in different instances.