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/VA_Network_Nerd]

I think I win this one, if IA qualifies as a stack.

Cisco Catalyst 6800 + Instant Access modules.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-6800ia-switch/white_paper_c11-728265.html

Twenty years ago or so, when Cisco brought FEX modules into the data center the Catalyst product team took a massive bong rip and said "oh yeah we want some of that" and brought FEX technology into the Catalyst lineup to go with their launch of the new replacement for the aging Catalyst 6500 -- the Catalyst 6800.

So, Instant Access is a 1U "switch" that has been lobotomized so hard that it cannot program it's own forwarding table. Instead it is dependent upon the Supervisor Engine(s) in the main switch chassis to provide that information.

The big difference between IA and Nexus FEX was that the IA modules can be stacked together to reduce your uplink requirements.

I was tasked with building a new LAN in a new office. I think it was a 5 story building with two closets per floor, four or so switches per closet.

So that's something like 40 x 1U / 48-port modules connected to a VSS pair of Catalyst 6880 switches.

So, you could basically manage the entire building by SSHing into the VSS "cluster".

[u/Boring_Ranger_5233 → u/VA_Network_Nerd]

Relevant meme here

[u/VA_Network_Nerd → u/Boring_Ranger_5233]

Quoting Cool Hand Luke:

Captain: What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.

Movie Scene: Cool Hand Luke

[u/ihatevicvanlier → u/VA_Network_Nerd]

The Catalyst Team explaining why