Physical stacking question

[cnyengineer]

Quick question.

I just installed two MS350s at one of my locations and stacked them together. The stack seems to be working fine and the dashboard didn't complain about anything however I'm only using one stack cable going from port 1 on switch 1 to port 1 on switch 2. Traffic is shown as going across that stack link too.

Is this correct? We do have another location where only two MS250s are stacked and I see two stacking cables between them.

[Frank Osberg]

Normal recommendation is that you do a cross stack, meaning using 2 stack cables, but you can use it with only 1, but you will miss your redundancy here then.

[aleabrahao]

The ideal would be to have two cables for the Stack for high availability reasons. But as it is, it will not prevent it from functioning correctly.

[cnyengineer]

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

One other question on this topic: Can I have an uplink to the firewall on both of the stack members? In the physical stacking guide it mentions just having a single uplink.

[aleabrahao]

If your firewall supports LACP you can definitely do this. But if it is a Meraki firewall you have to enable STP since the MX does not support LACP.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Networks_and_Routing/MX_Layer_2_Functionality#LACP_.26_Link_Aggregation

[Frank Osberg]

Agree, but most firewalls can do this. 😉

[Brash]

To add to the other answers in this thread, using 2 cables to stack in a 'ring' topology isn't just recommended, it's the supported topology as per the stacking guide.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Stacking/Switch_Stacks#Configuring_a_Physical_Switch_Stack

[joey.debra]

It will work as it is now but it is in fact a failure scenario. You should invest that little 100-ish$ for the second cable and just connect the full ring.