MS350 Stacking Question

[Troyee]

Hi Everyone,

I would like to ask if i stack two physical switches using a 10G Twinax Cable, should i use the default stacking port which is at the back or can i do a semi stacking which needs to be on the front port? Can i also ask if what is the major difference of virtual stacking with physical stacking?? Sorry for the newbie question.

Will appreciate your response.

Thank you everyone.

[AjitKumar]

Hi,

Following is my understanding.

I believe MS350 supports only "Physical Stacking".

This means we need to use the Stacking Ports at the Back of the Switches. To Use these Port we need to buy "Stacking Cables".

Kindly check the below url displaying the compatible accessories.

https://meraki.cisco.com/products/switches/accessories

The Twinax cable can only be used in SFP+ ports to interconnect switches as "Uplinks" and also for  "Flexible Stacking".

You may refer to the following page (If you have not). This has answers to most of your questions.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Stacking/Switch_Stacks

[PhilipDAth]

@AjitKumar  is correct.

The physical stacking uses the 40Gbe ports on the back.  It makes it look like a single switch, so you can Etherchannel across them, and it acts as a single switch in spanning tree, etc.

If you connect them using the 10Gbe ports on the front they are just two switches connected together.  The spanning tree is seperate.  And you can not LACP across the switches.

[BrechtSchamp]

I'll add that virtual stacking is a term Meraki uses to illustrate that stacking is not really needed if you just want to configure more than one switch (or ports on them) at the same time. Using the checkbox in dashboard you can execute changes on multiple at the same time. Using tags this can be even more efficient as you can easily search on a tag and select all of the resulting switches/ports.

Mind you that this doesn't enable the other techniques that usually come with stacking: Etherchannel, redundancy, uplink sharing between stack members.

Virtual stacking is supported by all Meraki switches.

Physical and flexible stacking were already described by @AjitKumar and @PhilipDAth .