Powerconnect 5324 redundancy

Well depends. If your looking for power failover you could just use two different UPS's for each switch. If you are looking for redundancy with power you could use the redundant power on the back. So the switch would have two different power sources.

 

Or you could do complete redundancy where if one switch failed it would just use the other. Not sure if you are running servers off of these are not or what you  have connected to it so its a little difficult in giving a description.

 

We use the 3448 models and they have two ports that we use for redudancy. 1st port goes to 2nd port on 2nd switch. 2nd switch 1 port goes to 2nd port on the next switch and so forth. You will probaly need to ready your manual to find the process. Not sure if the 5324 has this option. One is a master and if the master fails the secondary one will kick in. Hope this helps.

 

Jim

 

I am not sure you can use all 24 ports if you are using any of the ports at the end of the switch(i.e. Fiber Modules) so you will only have 22 ports at the maximum if you do failover.(As far as I know)

A complete redundancy is exactly what I would like to do.  One as the master and the second switch should kick in when the master fails. 

 

I have created 3 VLANS on the master switch and I left 4 ports available if I would need to link the two switches.  Would i have to configure the second switch exactly the same, with the same VLANS?

 

My problem is that I read the manual, but it is not straight forward and does not help with switch redundancy.  Can you give me some direction?  Is it just plugging the switches into eachother, what else would need to be configured?  Maybe you can give me your configuration as an example.

I am not entirely sure of the exact process myself but I can promise you that the switch is a lot smarter than you think. As far as assigning the VLAN's on the second switch I would image you would have to. I believe, dont quote me, that the second switch doesn't even need to have an ip address and don't think you want to. Basically when you plug them in together in the correct way it will know which one is master and which one is secondary. You can access both switches by the IP address that you have configured on the first one. As they both have been mirrored the same switch. (I think the trick is turning on the first one first and than the second and so forth. Once it learns this if the power were to go off and they came on at the same time, the first one would remember who was boss last time and take control.

 

We have stacks of four. So we just sign into one switch and than do all the configurations we need. (It shows all of the switches as one IP address)So we essentially end up having a 192 port switch.

Hope this helps.

Navila,

 

I don't have any 5324 switches, so I'm not sure if you can have full redundancy with them.  If you still can I would recommned that you send those back and go for the 6224.  It has a feature called resilient stacking.  You have to buy special stacking modules which allow you to manage both switches as a single unit.  The you can setup LAGs to your servers and other edge swiches with each port on the LAG spread accross the stack.   These can also handle your layer 3 vlan routing although I do not use that on mine.

5324 i not stackable, so you need another redundancy plan.

 

You should design your network to have redundant paths and then use spanning tree to eliminate the redundant paths. Here is an article (the 33xx cli is the same as the 5324 cli):

 

http://www.Dell.com/downloads/global/products/pwcnt/en/app_note_13.pdf

 

Post your config and a picture of the network you are implementing.