MS425-16 Warm spare with stacking, what options are possible

[Djomatch]

Hello,

I'm actually deplying 4 MS425-16, two stacked switches in each datacenters and muss have a VRRP between them.

What options do I have, since it seems like Warm spare doe not work while stacking is activated.

Thanks in advance.

[kYutobi]

Why use VRRP if you're already stacking?

In a warm spare MS configuration, VRRP will be leveraged to exchange heartbeats and determine if the warm spare should take over when the primary fails.  But if you just create a physical stack, and stagger your devices (especially any dual-homed devices) across multiple switches in a physical stack, that tends to meet the majority of use-cases.  You can also do cross-stack LACP so if you're uplinking/downlinking to other switches or switch stacks, that works too.  Double check this doc https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Layer_3_Switching/MS_Warm_Spare_(VRRP)_Overview to see if it's really what your requirements dictate as opposed to physical stacking, and let us know if something's not clear.

[jdsilva]

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@Djomatch wrote:

I'm actually deplying 4 MS425-16, two stacked switches in each datacenters and muss have a VRRP between them.

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This implies stretching L2 between your DC's. Don't do that. Tell your server guys it's a dumb idea. Use L3 instead.

[PhilipDAth]

You'll need to change your design.  You can't stack the switches and use VRRP.  One or the other.

You might want to consider using the stacked switches for layer 2 connectivity only, and using dedicated layer 3 devices for providing default gateway protection.

If you want to use a single set of devicea then Meraki switching may not be the right choice.  You could consider using the Cisco Nexus family instead.

I respectively disagree with @jdsilva .  I used stretched layer 2 DC designs all the time.  It is not straight forward being able to have a DR strategy for some apps that involves you having to re-IP them.  Keeping everything look the same gives you huge safety.

[Djomatch · Accepted solution]

Hello everyone, thanks for your feedback.

I finaly decided to use virtual stacking between all DC Switches, which solved our problem.

Regards,

Lionel