Physically moving stacked 9300 switches

[PACC]

Hi all,

Simple question!

We have two C9300 switches that are stacked.  We want to physically move the switches with minimal downtime (they are doing all our layer 3 stuff).

• Switch 1 (active)
• Switch 2 (standby)

There are currently only 12 ports being utilised in total.  Some are port channels that connect to both switches and some are individual links.  The individual links are on switch 1 but switch 2 has ports that are configured so if switch 1 dies, we can just move the cables to the corresponding ports on switch 2.

I had the idea of disconnecting switch 2, moving it to the new rack, powering it on then doing a cable swap.  Remove all cables from switch 1, and plug them into switch 2 so the network is back up and running with minimal downtime.  Then move switch 1 over and reconnect it to the stack.

I just want to confirm that when reconnecting switch 1, all will continue as normal?  Is there anything on the stack side I should do?

thanks

jc

[pieterh]

You can make this procedure work
Just do not connect both switches uplink at the same time
-> first remove move the uplink from the active switch, then connect the second switch
this is because both switches share the same management IP-address
and if the stack is "broken" both switches will try to be the stack-master and claim the management ip-addres

if the racks are not too widely apart, you can even order a 3m. stacking cable (one is enough)
and let the second switch join the stack after moving to the new position.
then reconnect all cables to the second switch and move the first switch (using short stack cables again)

[PACC]

Actually we were able to move the switches without powering them off!  The racks were close enough and facing each other, so we did a quick swap of the power cables to longer ones coming from the destination rack, data cables were long enough.

We have another problem that occurred after the successful move but I will make a different post about that.