Behavior of multiple uplinks on a MS 225 stack.

[ToryDav]

Hi all,

I need to understand the default behavior if I have two or four uplinks from my MS 225 MDF stack going up to a pair of HA firewalls (non-meraki..Checkpoint). 

Basically my thought is this, the Firewall can take care of load balancing or failover scenarios for the ISPs, but if I want multiple uplinks (one or two to each of the firewalls), how does the switch handle having multiple uplinks to the firewall(s)?

I may just be overthinking things, but lets say I have two links to the active firewall, does the MS automagically load-balace those two links since they both lead to the active device? or should I just stick with one uplink to each?

Diagram:

Cheers,
Tory

[cmr · Accepted solution]

@ToryDav unless you can use LACP port aggregation on the firewalls, just one link from the stack to each firewall will be active, spanning tree protocol (STP) should shut down the other ones so you don't get a traffic loop.

If you can use port aggregation on the firewalls then you can have multiple active links and improved bandwidth.