Bill, With the right amount of prep work and understanding of how the stacking works, you can control everything you complained about. I complained about the same stuff until I read the document that explains how to: 1) Renumber a switch in the cluster (and all of it's interfaces with it) 2) Hot swap a new switch into the cluster 3) - and this one's sweet - upgrade the s/w on the entire cluster in one shot, even if they're different models 4) Control which switch is the master so that adding a new switch to the stack doesn't chance screwing up your configs. 5) Permanently remove all stacking config from the switch The actual backplane has lived up performance wise in the testing I've done, but I haven't come anywhere near testing it to 32gbps. Just the same as thousands of people have wiped out every VLAN on their network by putting in a switch with a higher VTP revision number with no VLANs defined, it takes a learning curve to work well with these suckers. Granted - the software has been somewhat buggy - but those aren't the merits I'm debating. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/hw/switches/ps5023/products _configuration_guide_chapter09186a00801a6558.html
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Bill Woodcock Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 11:33 AM To: Deepak Jain Cc: Frederic NGUYEN; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: 10GE access switch router
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Deepak Jain wrote: > Just a note, if you want redundant 10GE uplinks you need to get two of > these and stack them. The stacking interface does not reduce the amount > of switching bandwidth to the front ports IIRC.
...and the stacking interface is actually pretty lousy, from our testing. We were anticipating really liking it, but we haven't touched it again, since our lab work. Obviously it precludes hot-swappability, but beyond that, using it wipes any preexisting configuration on all but the first box (and out of two, I don't know how to predict which it will decide is first, in advance), and it leaves the port-numbering screwed up on any boxes that have used it, in perpetuity.
-Bill
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