PowerConnect 5548 Stacking

Effectively what stacking offers you is the ability to combine multiple switches as one with the onset of redundancy should one or more fail.  This has advantages not only as a single point of managment, but also from a "configuration" standpoint; for example creating VLANs from a single stack means you only have to do it once where in separate switches you would have to repeat the process for each an every switch.  

As for the specs, here's a cut/paste off the manual...

The system supports up to "eight units" with two fixed HDMI stacking ports.

The HDMI ports are 1.3a specification, Category 2 High Speed cables, 340

MHz (10.2 Gbit/s).

The stacking feature supports the following features:

• Fast-link failover

• Software auto-synch.

• Improved response time to events, such as master failover

• Auto-numbering algorithm when choosing unit number

Things to consider when stacking, is your band width.  Each cable is only capable of handling 10Gig/s - keep that in mind as you lay this out (max x2), while your switch is capable of 48 inband ports per switch.

Bottom line is, this is a cost effective deployment method when redundancy is needed.  Just understand your limits and you should be good (i.e.  Bandwidth across the stacked switches, type of traffic, number of layered features, etc).

Hope this helps.  Share your thoughts further if this doesn't answer your question.

One more item I forgot.  If you could give some idea of how you plan to lay out your VM environment we can point you to some best practices on how to use a stack.

later