VLAN BETWEEN STACKS

[GFrazier]

I would like a bit of insight on stacking from anyone with good experience...I wanted to see if anyone had any experience on this and would like to share their view on it and if it would be the best option:

I am currently putting together a network design and was studying the option of stacking.  I want to keep the management simple as possible because this network will be monitored and managed in a different geographical location (in another state).  The environment will rely heavily on bandwidth for a large number of users.  There will be a fiber backbone.

There will be 3 floors - 1 switch on the grown floor, 2 switches on the middle floor, and 3 on the main floor with firewall (All Meraki - MS225 switches; MX250 firewall).  I saw that stacking with these model switches are far less expensive than uplinking  each individual switch on the floors with more than one switch.

My concern is VLANing... VLAN trunking between the stacks should not be a problem would it?

[cmr · Accepted solution]

@GFrazier from a data plane point of view think of stacking being like having three line cards in one chassis.  There is absolutely no issue with VLANs between stacks and it works very well.  The only areas where a Meraki (non MS390) stack separates out is for management where each switch (stack member) has it's own management interface and IP address and secondly for the power where each stack member is separately powered.

In the MS390 these are all common so it really is like a chassis switch with line cards.

[GFrazier]

Thanks cmr for you feedback... so basically its like I thought - a single switch of multiple physical switches... 

[Jeizzen]

Would someone see any possible issue if for a 2 switches stack, each switch would be given a mangement ip adress in a different vlan from the other switch ?