Adding a 3750X to an existing Stack of 3750Xs

[hereim]

Hi there,


I am new in this area and wanted to know i am not missing anything before I go forward with this upgrade.


We have a 2 stacks of 3750X ether-channeled togther and sharing VLANS across. Now we have a requirement of adding one new 3750X switch on each stack and add some new VLANs to it. Moreover, some ports from this new units would connect to a new iSCSI network device and few ESX servers.

So what i understand, from each of these devices there would be dual links connections, one to each stack (for load balancing and redundancy).


I wanted to confirm what all things I should follow to make this happen:

1. check on ios and license-set on the stack and the new switches. show version shall tell me about the ios but how do we confirm what licenses/feature set a stack has?

2. How to add the new unit to the stack, whats the best practise? is there any doc for that?

3. How abt the dual connection to the devices? i am afriad it should not invite STP to kick in and defeat the load balancing object. is there anything like split etherchannel?


Thanks in advance!


Mo

 

[dgrizzard]

1) Do show version, your new switch will need to be on the same version as your old switches. Also, when adding make sure your primary switch is specifically set so when you add the new switch it doesn't try to become the master. (See the full document I link below about setting the master via priority)

2) Overall this is a good doc, but this link will show you a diagram of how 3 switches should look on the back side to give the best redundancy.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/swi...ax/configuration/guide/swstack.html#wp1151629

3) When you connect the new switch your ports on that switch will look like g3/0/1 for port 1. All you would need to do is create an etherchannel on two ports on different stack members for dual links. So say for instance I created an etherchannel with g2/0/1 and g3/0/1 as members. Then if switch 3 went down my 1 link from g2/0/1 in the etherchannel would still be up. As true with etherchannel in general STP will see the etherchannel as one link not as the separate links.

 

[hereim]

hi dgrizzard

thanks for the above info. so far i cud not take out time to check the version and test the config you suggested. However, whenever I get time, I'll do this and let you know how i go.

Cheers!