…There’s a nice little pdf to get you through
HP is aware that most of networking engineers start their learning process in Cisco Networking Academy. Is is a normal course of events if you want to learn networking. Cisco has the very best study materials and best, carefully developed syllabus that is both high quality and most detailed in the world of networking. Not to mention the high reputation that engineers get with Cisco certificates standing by their names.
On the other hand, when you take an average mid-size business customer today you will probably see that he is mostly concerned about the price and not so much about the feature-set and robustness of IT equipment. And there you have your situation in which customer decides to go with HP rather than Cisco gear in their communication closet.
You as a networking engineer, of course, with focus on Cisco devices and their way of configuring in command line interface – CLI are getting the job to connect to HP switch CLI and configure few basic thing like vlans, trunk ports, and management access. Soon enough you will see what vendors difference in CLI design is all about. On HP all the logic behind vlan tagging, trunks, access ports is upside down is you are coming from Cisco world. The other thing that you will surely notice is HP documentation and the fact that is not really close to Cisco’s nicely sorted documentation where all that you need is in one place.
Here’s a nice little pdf from HP that will keep you going
HP is aware of all above mentioned things so they made this nice pdf book that’s free to download from their site.
“Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide – Version 2” will, as the name claims, help you in configuring HP even if Cisco IOS CLI is the only thing you are familiar with. You have almost 300 pages of compared commands for everything starting from management IP address to simple QoS config.
The link is to google search as it will probably take HP only few weeks to change the link to this book again. You need to register of their site in order to download this pdf for free.
The “HP Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide – Version 2” is available from HP Press http://hppress.com. Also, here is another write-up about it with a few sample screen shots: http://abouthpnetworking.com/
Another comment, HP Networking has 2 different CLI’s for networking gear: their original gear known as ProCurve uses what’s called ProVision and their acquisition of 3Com/H3C back in 2010 and its gear using what’s called Comware. Much of Comware is kinda similar to Cisco IOS CLI, where ProVision is mostly different as you mentioned.
The “HP Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide – Version 2” covers all 3 OS’s.
hth…Jeff Carrell
Thanks Jeff for your expert contribution here,
Realy appreciate your effort to get our audience all needed info,
An update, in May 2015, HP released version 3 of the CLI Reference Guide….now covers HP ProVision, HP Comware 5, HP Comware 7, and CIsco IOS. Still free from HPE Press 🙂
https://hpepress.hpe.com/product/HP+Networking+and+Cisco+CLI+Reference+Guide+-+Version+3-PDF-15901
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the update, I will put it inside the article too.
Is always great to see you joining my blog with useful updates and infos 🙂