Stacking 1200 Series Switches

[ianober]

Can you "stack" a 1238P (1700599G1) and a 1234 POE (1702595G1) switch?

[jayh]

Not in the traditional sense of "stacking" where a special cable is used to manage a group of switches as a single unit with a high-speed interconnection between the backplanes.

You can of course interconnect the two switches with a trunk permitting all VLANs. As these are 100Mbit switches, I'd trunk an SFP port on each switch together with a cable such as the Adtran 1200484G1 or generic equivalent. If your switches are first generation, inter-switch throughput will be 1GBPS. If newer, 2.5 GBPS. If you need more you could use two such cables in an LACP bundle.

[ianober]

Thank you for the response Jay.  So would you say that the "stacking" of switches is more purely for management simplicity and does not offer any redundancy or failover features like in a Cisco 3600 series switch or the like?

[jayh]

Stacking of switches via a special stacking cable usually does these three things, as a rule.

1. The stack of switches are managed as a single unit with a single configuration.
2. There is higher throughput between switch chassis than would be achieved with a trunk port.
3. The MAC address table is shared throughout the stack and it is treated as a single "hop".

However, in a small deployment where you just need a few more ports at the location it's often more economical to just trunk two non-stackable switches together, especially if the three items above aren't important to your situation. Advantages of trunking:

1. Non-stacking switches are considerably less costly than stacking models.
2. No special cables needed.
3. It's possible to mix and match features such as fast-ethernet ports on one switch and gig on another, or PoE on one and not others.
4. By using an SFP jumper cable, you can get very good throughput and don't waste copper ports.
5. It's possible to add switches of different models or from different vendors.