A colleague of mine has tested this and verified that it in fact does work. He did note that you cannot enable flow control on a per interface basis it has to be done for the entire switch. This is a little bit of an issue because it is recommended that this is enabled on the NetApp interfaces but not for VMWARE hosts. So it's a bummer if you have your storage and virtualization systems connected to the same stack.
Apparently Dell makes a stackable switch that provides functionality close to Cisco's Stackwise.
Like the Cisco 3750 series switches, with the Dell PowerConnect 6200 series you can have a Port-Channel span multiple physical switches. Cisco calls this Cross-Stack EtherChannel, I haven't quite figured out what Dell calls it yet.
While the performance isn't as robust as some of the 3750 switches, the price is way lower.
From Dell's site it was hard to determine whether or not the PowerConnect did support this type of configuration. I confirmed with two different people at Dell that it did. I am waiting on a couple to test.
6 comments:
Have you been able to confirm this yet? We're talking cross-stack link aggregation, right?
I still haven't been able to test this out yet. I'm hoping to get the hardware soon.
Yes, we are talking cross stack link aggregation. I spoke with the PowerConnect folks at Dell twice and they confirmed each time.
I spoke with them too, but won't believe it until I see it, since they also claim "All stackable switches can do this"...
I am weary as well. That's why I'm trying to get a few demo units from Dell before I do any Production Deployments. I'll keep this updated.
it does actually work. I have a few of these switches in a stack with several cross switch port-channels going on :)
Awesome, thanks for the info Cody
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