Dell S4048-ON VLT Port Channel and Preventing Port Flapping

Hello,

We have been working on setting up two Dell S4048-On switches with VLTi and a VLT Port Channel. At the moment, we are fully functional but need to do some testing to see how the system reacts during certain failures. In researching this, a co-worker found information on setting up Port Dampening. I believe the following is pulled directly from the switch's manual.

At start-up time, once the physical ports are active a newly started VLT peer takes several seconds to fully negotiate protocols and synchronize. The attached devices are not aware of that activity and upon activation of a physical interface, the connected device will start forwarding traffic on the restored link, despite the VLT peer unit being still unprepared. It will black-hole traffic. Dampening (or equivalent) should be configured on the attached device. Dampening will temporarily hold an interface down after a VLT peer device reload. A reload is detected as a flap: the link goes down and then up. Suggested dampening time is 30 seconds to 1 minute.

The existing switch that the VLT Po is "uplinking" to does not support this feature. We plan to replace it in the future with two more Dell VLT switches but that is not the current task.

We were having a discuss about all of this and I'm curious why dampening must happen on the "attached device". I know enough about networking to be dangerous, but it seems to me that the VLT switch that is powering on (due to reboot, replace, maintenance, or whatever) should "shutdown" all ports not related to VLTi until the switch is fully on and synchronized. To me this would be the same as if all of the cables and/or ports of the switch's connected devices died all at the same time. Unlikely but regardless they are not functioning (same as the port being off). This case wouldn't affect the switch's operation.

Anyway, the question... is there a technical reason that this is not possible? I'm assuming there is because at first blush it seems like the simplest solution.

Thank you for your time!