How do I make a redundant connection between 2 Cisco switches? 3

[tektipsblitz]

Looking at getting two Catalyst 2960S-24TS switches... The switches would be connected together using fiber (courtesy of SFP transceivers)

My question is - can I connect the switches together using 2 fiber cables....so if one cable fails... the other one acts as a standby? Or can I use this method to gain extra speed?

Is this kind of failover possible? if so what exactly is it called? I have seen terms like link aggregation, trunking, standby etc.

 

[Silverblade]

When you connect both. The spanning tree protocol will disable one of the two ports and you'll get the redundancy as you want, because if the working fiber will fail. the other will automatically be enabled.

You can also use both to gain higher throughput. There fore you'll need to configure a port channel.

 

[kyoores]

What you are looking for is Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). The STP prevents creation of data loops on switched networks which are using several links for redundancy.
All you have to do is properly configure the ports and the STP mechanism will settle the ports for the forwarding state and other two for blocking state ( backup link).
You can determine which link is the root link by setting the port priority manually.

 

[Viconsul]

Hello Tektipsblitz,

The best way to achieve all you want is to setup an etherchannel on the ports, so that the selected ports will be bundled together as one logical port channel, this will give you additional throughput and redundancy. You may also want to apply a load balancing mechanism on the port channel to distribute the traffic across the port evenly.

-HTH
Viconsul