As there seems to be a lot of weariness surrounding the MS390 / C9300 / C9300-M series switches, I thought I'd document a set up experience.
When opening the boxes the first concern is that in both, the power supply had come out of the cardboard 'bracket' that is supposed to hold it on one side of the box and was loose, still surrounded by it's packing foam, but clearly having been thown about! The switch itself is very well protected, so at least that is good.
The first switch was put on a desk, power supply inserted, port 1 connected to the internet and powered up. After about 10 minutes of various sequences of yellow and green lights on the front, then seemed to settle down to steady green and blue.
The serial number was added to the dashboard and after another 5-10 minutes then switch went green and the assorted status pages showed the expected states with the main difference being the power page where there is information about power stacking, both ports showing down at this time.
The second switch was set up and a cable connected between them. As before it took about 10 minutes for the lights to settle down and the switch to go green in the dashboard.
The power stacking cables were then connected (using some from existing C3850s), this did not initially show up anything on the dashboard.
When the data stacking cables were connected the switches rebooted, formed a stack called stack - 2 (there was already an MS stack in the network) and now the power stacking correctly reported ports up on both switches and power sharing across the stack. Interestingly, even though each switch has an 1100W power supply, there is only 510W of PoE available:
Tomorrow - DHCP with options...
Day 2
Creating a layer 3 interface works the same as on an MS with the default gateway needing to be defined when the first is set up.. I then enabled the DHCP server and added the required options, unfortunately options 15 (Domain Name) and 46 (NetBIOS node type) are not supported and you get the message below:
Interestingly, the named option 45 - "NetBIOS name server" does work!
I have logged a support ticket and await feedback beyond the initial "this is unsupported".
Front panel
The C9300 series has the below front panel:
On the C9300-M switches we have, the bottom row of lights functions as documented, but the top row are not lit up and you cannot use the mode button to select between them. As the switches are dashboard managed, I presume this is by design.
Today, power stacking testing:
We removed the power cable from one switch and as expected the stack continued to be fully powered from the remaining power supply. An excellent feature that I wish the MS switches would have!
The power stacking light on the front of the switch with the active power supply changed from solid green to solid amber to indicate that it is now critical, whilst the light remained green on the other switch.
On the dashboard, the StackPower figures adjust as expected, but the PoE budget and usage figures go a bit AWOL!
On the switch with no connected power cable, the numbers all adjust as expected:
Another quirk is that if you have MS and CS switches in the same network and flip between them, the StackPower section of the Power tab does not show unless you refresh the page. I don't know if this happens in CS only networks.
