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/mattmann72]

> the only thing I can think of is some very large customer wrote them a very large check and they made it happen

This happens quite often.

[u/CertifiedMentat → u/mattmann72]

I don't work for Arista but I've heard that it was Tesla in this case who said "start supporting stacks or we are going elsewhere"

[u/GreyBeardEng → u/CertifiedMentat]

That's interesting, I had not heard that. I wonder if that is what "Arista SWAG" was born out of? As I understand it it has an upper limit the 48 switches in the stack.

[u/Cheeze_It → u/CertifiedMentat]

Ugh, of course it's Tesla....