I have been tasked to rewire our server room. Not really looking forward to it, but I have to take this opportunity to wire everything in the best way possible. I am looking to ensure redundancy and the highest performance possible. I have acquired various switches throughout the years, and make sure to try to keep similarities. We have been pushing to get 10Gb to all of our serves and network storage. We currently are running 3 physical boxes on VMware and connecting to EMC Unity all-flash array. I also have a couple of physical servers that are running ERP and other custom apps. All physical servers/storage are connected to the MS425 either via 10Gb copper SFP+ (Cat 6) or 10Gb Twinax. All end users are connecting via 1Gb and most have POE for our Cisco phones. My idea is to stack both of the MS425s with the QSFP stacking cables, stack the MS42Ps virtually with 10Gb Twinax cables, and stack the MS350s with stacking cables. I have not received the Cisco 9500s yet, but hope they can be stacked too.
With three different stacks (not including the 9500s), what is the best way to connect them and ensure redundancy and performance? I am planning on bringing each of them down to the 9500s with 10Gb Twinax (copper SFP+ if the MS425s are too far). I will use LACP to aggregate the ports on the 9500s, but how many connections do I really need? I am looking at connecting a port on each switch to a port on each of the 9500s (see various diagrams below) for uplink. Is there any benefit to having all of these uplinks (4 on the MS425 stack, 8 on the MS42P virtual stack, and 4 on the MS350 stack)?
Thank you for taking the time to look this over and letting me know if I have way overkilled this, or even created such a mess that it will not work.
Jeff
