We are having an intermittent issue with a campus of Alcatel-Lucent Omniswitch switches, ranging from model 6000 to 6850. We are having a problem tracking down the root cause of our issue. The seems to be some rogue traffic or something causing all of our switches to slow to a crawl. Connecting to the console port on any switch and issuing the CLI command "show health" shows us that the CPU load is pegged at 100.
There are many VLANs on the switches, however, whatever traffic that is causing this, is traversing all the switches within seconds. OmniVista (a monitoring program from Alcatel-Lucent) reports a whole bunch of new spanning tree activity happening as the switch CPU load goes to 100. Our network scheme is a star, with one core stack switch and all the other switch stacks hang from a port on the core. There are a few secondary switches with a port connecting a third level switch. There are no physical possibility of someone, outside of the server room, to run a cable from one star-branch switch to another to create a network loop.
We've been on the phone with Alcatel-Lucent support for hours at a time for almost a month now, without any solution.
Can a single computer or printer cause this kind of enterprise-wide failure across switches? Can it be stopped or prevented?