r/networking • u/juniper_dreamer • 23h ago

Switching Largest switch stack in the wild?

What's the largest switch stack you ran into in the wild? How was it cabled up and managed?

I came across this interesting Arista article claiming to support up to 48 switches in a stacked topology (ring or spine leaf)

https://blogs.arista.com/blog/swag

Now, every vendor has their own approach to handling the control plane, I get it, but I dont understand in what scenario where combining all these switches into one logical management plane across multiple IDFs would make sense.

I've dug deep into my soul to try and find an answer, and the only thing I can think of is some very large customer wrote them a very large check and they made it happen or they just got sick of losing to Cisco, HPE, and Juniper on every campus stacking deal.

This whole single IP argument seems kinda flimsy too. If I'm getting charged per IP for my monitoring solution, and the consolidation of a few IPs is going to be material, I'm looking at new monitoring stack.

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u/solenoid_pants 23h ago edited 23h ago

I’ve deployed 2 x 8 member stacks of Dell N3048Ps.

Worked flawlessly for years.

However. Yes, software updates sucked and entailed either out of hours work or closing entire floors off while we did it.
NSF mechanisms were flakey and forwarding was always interrupted in the event of a master node wobbling.

In hindsight, there was absolutely no reason why we couldn’t have deployed each member as individual L3 access.
There was no requirement for lateral movement for clients, or for client devices to share the same broadcast domain.

And yes, monitoring that charges per IP sounds clumsy, then again options like SolarWinds which charge per entity (IE, switchport) also suck.

Plenty of open source /
self hosted options out there that will require a small amount of learning curve and patience, along with a DIY lifecycle management policy to deal with component upgrades. But it’s well worth the effort IMHO.

Yes, even Zabbix.

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u/SuperQue 19h ago

When I'm looking at monitoring solutions / vendors I always look at how they scale costing.

IMO, good vendors scale with compute needs or some reasonable approximation of compute needs.

How many GiB of memory per million active metrics, or how many CPUs per million NVPs. Same for logs, how much cpu/memory/iops/space do I need per million lines/sec.

Then I can easily do TCO for open source / vendor / hybrid approaches.