We recently received Arista 7050S-52 switches which do not have stacking capability. I plan on using two of them for our ESXi hosts. Each host will have six 10GbE ports used for Storage, Access, Management, and vMotion. Being that I am not really a network guy, I never even heard of MLAG until reading through the specs of the switch. Based on some brief research it sounds like it is basically the same as stacking as it allows you to connect two logical switches to act as one logical switch for the purpose of L2 protocols such as STP or LACP. This is perfect and what I wanted to do with the switches to begin with but had no clue it could be accomplished without stacking cables.
So, the main question is, am I right that using MLAG will create a single logical switch just like switches that support stacking?
Second question, would I use ports 49, 50, 51, and 52? Although they are separate from the other 48 ports, they don't appear to be uplinks and seem to just be standard 10Gb ports like the rest.
Third question, is using four ports for 40Gbps throughput too much? Each switch supports up to 1.04Tbps of throughput, so 40Gbps seems insignificant. Not to mention I have seen 1Gb switches that support up to 80Gbps with Full duplex stacking cables.
So, the main question is, am I right that using MLAG will create a single logical switch just like switches that support stacking?
Second question, would I use ports 49, 50, 51, and 52? Although they are separate from the other 48 ports, they don't appear to be uplinks and seem to just be standard 10Gb ports like the rest.
Third question, is using four ports for 40Gbps throughput too much? Each switch supports up to 1.04Tbps of throughput, so 40Gbps seems insignificant. Not to mention I have seen 1Gb switches that support up to 80Gbps with Full duplex stacking cables.