[c-nsp] Stacking 3750X vs diverse 4948E

[Alexander Lim]

When doing IOS upgrade, you need to reboot the whole switches in the stack. 

Regards,
Alexander Halim

On May 19, 2012, at 5:00 AM, Keegan Holley <keegan.holley at sungard.com> wrote:

> The 3750X is relatively new so I've only seen a few of them.  Stackwise in
> general is pretty solid.  I've never seen a whole stack fail.  If a member
> fails the stack just keeps going, if the master tails a new master is
> elected.  One thing to watch out for is the fact that the 3750X isn't
> intended to be a high performance DC switch.  I have seen issues with queue
> drops because of small packet buffers on the non-X version which leads to
> trouble if you do alot of 1G at line rate.  I haven't checked the X series,
> but I'm told it's not recommended for high performance environments either.
> 
> 
> 2012/5/18 David Coulson <david at davidcoulson.net>
> 
>> In a datacenter environment, we typically deploy 4948 top-of-rack switches
>> with L2 uplinks to our 6500 core - Systems get connections into two
>> different switches and rely on OS NIC bonding (mostly Linux) to support
>> switch failures. Switches running STP and in the last four years we've had
>> no issues with this design (including failures of systems connected to
>> diverse switches).
>> 
>> A new proposed configuration utilizes stacked 3750X switches, where
>> servers would be connected to multiple switches within the same stack. I
>> have next to no experience in the low-end switches that do stacking, but
>> from a general risk management perspective, it seems like a many eggs and
>> single basket configuration.
>> 
>> Does anyone have any solid experience with 3750X switches, or stacking in
>> a datacenter in general? I've seen plenty of stacks for closets/end-users,
>> but I don't see many in a top-of-rack config. Is Cisco stacking typically
>> 'reliable', in that when a switch fails it will leave the remainder of the
>> stack functional? What about a software issue? Does the whole stack crap
>> out and reload, or does the master just fail and a new one get elected?
>> 
>> I realize it's a pretty broad question, but it boils down to - Is a
>> stacked switch config significantly less reliable/resilient/available than
>> two TOR switches?
>> 
>> David
>> 
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