@Clive_A
Nope, not presales: we have a mix of sx3008 and sx3016 operating in an ERPS ring configuration for many months now. There are single 10GbE links between each switch, carrying two counter-directional ring instances. Each instance carries approx 5-6 data VLANs plus one protection VLAN. This was all configured per the TP-Link ERPS configuration guide, and works great - fail over recovery is very fast, and the rings are an economical approach to running a redundant multi-story small commercial building backbone.
We now want to extend some of these VLANs out of the ring switches, with a single link to a switch that doesn't support ERPS - because of the single link and because the non-ring switches don't support ERPS, there is a need to use some variant of stp to protect against loops.
TP link stands alone in ERPS providers (as far as my experience) in that the TP link ERPS declaration requires use of an MSTP instance to identify the VLANs protected by the ring - so we are asking if the MSTP instance used for the ring can also be used on non-ring ports: the little documentation TP link provides is totally silent on this! Further, the documentation does not state if we can assign a region name to the MSTP instance, or if the region needs to be left at the standard default of each switch Mac address.
Note that we definitely can't use a separate MSTP instance to provide loop protection for this application, as a VLAN can only be a member of a single MSTP instance and the ring requires that instance be for the ring.
If you can't answer this basic question about a product function, please refer me to someone who can - we can't afford to test this in production with the risk of knocking out our building backbone. Thanks.
-f