Source
r/msp•
MSPTech

Interconnecting Switches - Rookie Question

Yeah, I know this isn't the tech support sub but you guys are my family and I really respect the advice we all end up sharing here. I admit this might be a really stupid question, but how normal is it for you guys to just up link your switches with just a single Ethernet cable. Imagine 3 x Cisco SG300 switches. Do you just daisy chain them? What I've personally been pushing for but my techs always seem to avoid or skip is to setup LACP and aggregate 3 or 4 ports in to one. What is the right/common way you guys are stacking switches?

Posted Jul 25, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC · edited

617
Atlantisman•

Stacking ports, if the switches have them, which the SG300 don't. Or LACP 2-4 ports and daisy chain.

2
MSPTechOP•

OK, that's what I'm saying. My damn staff doesn't believe in it.

1
BlackLabTechs•

I don't like to daisychain either. Treat one as core and plug other switches into that. Reduces hop counts.

5
user_none•

That's not a hop count. Layer 3 (router) is a hop.

2
BlackLabTechs•

My bad. One less switch to go through.

2
GoToMSP•

So in his scenario, have one core switch which is only connected to the other switches or would it be acceptable to have a mix of connections to the other switches as well as some direct connections to clients? This is assuming that the two other switches are completely full so you have the choice of using the core for direct connections or the extra expense of adding an additional switch.

1
BlackLabTechs•

In this case I wouldn't add the expense of an extra switch, just connect Switch 2 and 3 to Switch 1 instead of Switch 1 connects to Switch 2 which connects to Switch 3. Then use any available ports on Switch 1 for devices. With today's speeds, it probably really doesn't matter unless it's going in a High Frequency Trading system. But they wouldn't be using those switches. lol.

2
myinternetisdown4•

Watch out for that spanning tree loop.

2
yutz23•

If you are looking at LAGG, you should really be looking at stacked switches with SFP/HDMI in a stack ring. Then there will only be 1 IP that you can login to the entire switch stack, even if it is made up of 3-4 switches.

2
MSPTechOP•

Yeah, we might standardize on SG500 POE with stacking.

1
Bdoubleya•

I highly recommend it, the $225 price difference has been worth it in my opinion.

1
Jahaziele•

Connect it to one core switch... Please don't daisy chain. You're giving me nightmares.

2
lenovoguy•

SFP stacking

1
Runethomas•

Spanning tree will let you have more than one unlagged link interconnected between multiple switches, think what would normally cause a network loop you can avoid with spanning tree. Visualize an interconnected web between 3 or more switches.

You can also LAG multiple cables into one redundant high bandwidth group. Also take note that some vendors use different names for the same things like cisco uses LAG for grouping multiple cables into one group (link aggregation group) and hp calls them Trunk groups.

Edit: added a few things.

1