Stacking and L3 switching

Shelster · 21 Feb 2019 at 10:13

Very quick sanity check here...

Am creating a network that will utilise 6 x switches and they are going to be stacked. Running over it there will be 2 x VLAN (data and management) and am going to enable ip routing so that I can utilise a server to access the management side of things.

Question is do I need to enable ip routing on all switches? As they are stacked they should appear as 1 switch, but if not enabled then would this stop inter VLAN traffic?

ChrisD. · 21 Feb 2019 at 10:17

Cisco switch?

Generally the stack becomes one logical switch, so if you enable L3 switching/IP routing it is enabled on all.

Shelster · 21 Feb 2019 at 10:54

Cheers Chris, that was what I had thought would happen. Plan is create the stack and then enable the switching plus do other config work

Using Dell N4032F switches. OS looks very similar to CISCO stuff.

ChrisD. · 21 Feb 2019 at 11:01

Yeah it is similar, few oddities in it but otherwise work fine. Make sure you're on the latest update if for production use as we had issues on the earlier versions.

Shelster · 21 Feb 2019 at 11:10

Chris...will do. The switches will be new out of box, so hopefully should have latest firmware on them, but will have a copy to hand just in case

ChrisD. · 21 Feb 2019 at 11:13

Haha, you'd hope so but likely not. They could have been sat in a warehouse for months before being shipped.

Caged · 23 Feb 2019 at 11:55

In addition to the above, load the new firmware on and then clear the config out completely if these are fresh out of the box. It's unlikely but if there's any legacy defaults in there that only applied to old firmware revisions you don't want them to stick around.