3448 Resilient Stacking

Question

I am soon purchasing 3 3448's to replace our 3048's. In the 3048's, there was a special stacking cable, which does not exist in the newer switches, I understand that I will have to manage all 3 switches separately. I would like to use both gigabit ports on each switch for "uplinking" between each switch. However, I want to do two things, increase bandwidth, and increase resilience. (with our 3048's, if one switch hiccups, the whole stack goes down.) Basically, given that I have switches 1-3 and gigabit ports G3 & G4, can I do something like:

1g4->2g3
2g4->3g3
3g4->1g3 (basically, connect top to middle to bottom, back up to top)

This gives the redundancy, in that each switch is plugged into the other two switches, so any one can fail can the other 2 continue to talk. However, there is no way to create a LAG group for these, is there? I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing they have to go to the same location to form a LAG. any other potential pitfalls I might be stepping into?

ProductManager · Answer

The 3048 stacking architecture was not resilient, but the 3448 architecture is. This means you do not need to manage all three switches separately. You use the standard GbE RJ-45 ports to connect to each switch using two cables, creating a resilient, ring architecture. Hope this helps solve your challenges and avoids the need for a LAG group.

QRiff · Answer

If the Resilient stacking is used in the 3448 using all of the Gigabit UTP ports, and the switches are all managed, and act like one big 144Port switch, will the "stacking" give me 2GB's of backplane, or Just 1GB with failover capabilities?

Also, I have a total of 6 SFP ports to play with (2per x 3 switches), I need 4, 2 for our fiber connection to another building, and 2 (with the 1GB UTP modules) for our PowerEdge 2850 server in that building. I want a link Aggreagation for the fiber uplinks, and another one for the server. Can I mix and max what physical chassis I plug the ports into? IE, (with the switches stacked) can I plug the server into Chassis1G1 and Chassis2G1 and "bond" them together for 2GB of throughput, or do they need to be in the same chassis? I would prefer not to for redundancy sake.

Thank you for your information in the previous post, sorry it lead to more questions ;)

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3448 Resilient Stacking

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