TRUE SWITCH HIGH AVAILABILITY "STACKING"

[isaaco001]

Dear Community,

If I have say one server or wlc and I need to connect it to two highly available switches,will a switch stack do the job?

In essence what I want to achieve is, if one switch fails the device connecting to the "stack" can continue operating.

Is this even possible?

Regards,

Isaac.

[balaji.bandi · Accepted solution]

based on your inputs ., yes if you terminate the Link on Switch 1 and Swtich 2 for the Dual homed device you get to solve the scenario you mentioned.

make sure your uplink also terminated switch 1 and switch 2 ( so you cover redundancy also)

[isaaco001]

Balaji,

So the device connecting to the switches has to have two connections to switch 1 and switch 2. A device with just a single connection cannot be able to make use of the redundancy, right?

Thanks!

[Joseph W. Doherty · Accepted solution]

Correct.

BTW, stacked switches provide additional redundancy, but don't forget the "minor" point to not have all the stack's switches on the same power feed, otherwise it becomes a single point of failure.

Further, to increase redundancy even further, you'll want uplinks to switches not in the same stack as the "shared" IOS on the stack of switches is somewhat another single point of failure. (Virtual switch stacks might be a bit better for redundancy, and/or VSS and/or vPC setups too.)

For additional physical redundancy (using separate devices), at L2 you still have the "old" option of running some STP variant, or using something like REP or Cisco's Flex Links. If your edge devices support L3, routing between them and core devices is another option.

[balaji.bandi]

Take example 

if the device has a single connection, it is connected to switch 2, if that fails you need to manually move the patch to Switch 1 to make it work, is this acesspatable?

stacking means if switch 1 fails switch 2 take over all the control plan and become master.

Not sure what kind of solution you looking or designing here ?

[Leo Laohoo]

It can be done. Cisco's stacking technology has been a success.