[c-nsp] Catalyst 3750 stacks with many members

[Ian Henderson]

jamie rishaw wrote on 2008-11-15:

>   Replace them. With Chassis(es).
>
>   Stacks are just a bad idea.

Can not agree more.

The problems we've seen with stacks seem mostly related to a master crash. If the master disappears, the slaves wouldn't perform a re-election.

Also, the stacking cables seem very fragile - even if they are screwed in properly, a bump can cause the stack to go haywire.

As many others have said, use the chassis individually. If you really need more bandwidth between devices than an Etherchannel of two to four GigE can give you, the 3750 is probably not the platform you're after.

If you're looking for ease of management, use RANCID's 'clogin' and some crafty bash. For example, create a new VLAN on ten switches (I'll ignore the fact VTP can do this for you):

for switch in `seq 1 10`
 do clogin -C 'conf t; vlan 123; name new_vlan; end; copy run start' sw-$switch.foobar.com
done


--
Ian Henderson, CCIE #14721
Senior Network Engineer, iiNet Limited