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Switch Uplinks (Noob question)

I

iTronz

n00b
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
5
Hey there, I've been reading the forums for some time and it has some of the best knowledge around and diversity around.

I come with a very simple question, If I have two switches and I connect eight cat6 cables between the switches will this in theory mean that my bandwidth between both switches is 8GB/s? Or am I just limited to one uplink port per switch?
 
you would just do 1 uplink per switch, most decent switches will shut off the multiple paths, so you would essentially waste 7 connections.
 
If you put the 8 links in a port-channel it will distribute traffic across all 8...it won't be evenly, but if you have multiple clients/servers talking across switches it will distribute them.
 
What switch has 8 uplink ports? I suppose u could set some to be uplinks, seems a waste to me, 2 would be the most I would use.
 
You can do this if your switches support 'link aggregation'

I don't think it will let a device on switch A talk to a device on switch B at 2 gig - but it will let two pairs of distinct devices both talk at 1 gig
 
Cisco 24 port switches generally allow 8 active and 9 standby ports for a total of 8 Etherchannel or .3ad LAG groups. 48 port switches sometimes offer more.
Typically netgear switches allow 4

Not sure about other brands. So if you hooked up 8 cables and you do not have Span-Tree or .3ad or Cisco Etherchannel then your switch will be rendered useless due to broadcast storm.
 
Thank you for the quick responses, my aim is to try and build a stackable switching system such as the netgear GS748TS series which have 20GB/s of connectivity between them.
 
A more practical question would be why? We connect a 4Gbit LAG connection to our core switch stack from our VM cluster of over 60 VMs and have no bandwidth issues to the 100 or so developers who access them.
 
I want to connect a few ESXi nodes to a SSD SAN with dual quad port nics, the main reason is to get as near to 10GbE without breaking the bank.

Is SFP a viable option for linking switches?
 
I'm not sure on Netgear, but with Cisco you can create an etherchannel with up to 8 links theoretically giving you up to 8 Gbps if it's gigabit. For switch to computer you could LACP the connections giving you again 4Gbps if it's gigabit. Theoretically.

You'd be better off going with 10Gbe or Fiber between switches and between switch to computer which gets costly quickly.
 
iTronz said:
I want to connect a few ESXi nodes to a SSD SAN with dual quad port nics, the main reason is to get as near to 10GbE without breaking the bank.

Is SFP a viable option for linking switches?
Click to expand...

NFS or iSCSI? How do you plan to set up the storage targets and clients to hash across all those links? Not nearly as simple as you'd think.
 
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