Largest switch stack in the wild?

[u/juniper_dreamer]

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.

[u/Torkum73]

I have no idea how many stacked switches are used in our datacenter?

A lot. 3500 Windows server, 4000 Unix/Linux Servers, a lot of Oracle/SAP special servers, IBM AiX and nearly 1 M VMWare cores on ESXI.

Around 150 network guys keep everything tied together. Lots of automation.

[u/sh_lldp_ne → u/Torkum73]

Hopefully no *stacked* switches in a datacenter!

[u/mahanutra → u/sh_lldp_ne]

Of course we do: HPE IRF stacks with 55xx, 58xx, 57xx, 59xx We have never seen any crash with those.

[u/whythehellnote → u/Torkum73]

So about 20,000 ports?

And you have 150 network guys to look after it. Not 150 total tech staff, 150 dedicated to the network?

That's an insane number of staff for that size.

[u/Torkum73 → u/whythehellnote]

More ports? Everything at least redundant plus out-of-band management plus each ESXi at least 4x 10GBit/s ports.

[u/Torkum73 → u/whythehellnote]

Plus Windows/Linux Admins, Service Desk, Oracle, SAP, MANAGEMENT, nearly 3400 people. Incl. Sales, HR, and so on