stacking SG500-28P switches

net tech · ‎03-03-2017

We have two offices located across the hall from each other.

There is a Cisco SG500-28P in each office ( frm: 1.4.7.6) We have 2 cat6 runs between the offices which interconnect the switches (LAG) Every night we push over 50Gb of data from one office to another.

We are considering another stacking switch for the main office as we are maxed out and looking forward to get away from LAG uplink ports.

Questions:

Can we create a loop using the stacking ports for redundancy?

SG500-28P in the remote office will get connected to the sG500-28P in the main office and a new SG500-28 via stacking ports, additionally we would connect SG500-28 to SG500-28P in the main office creating a loop.

Does STP apply to stacking ports?

Can we use RJ45 Copper SFP Transceiver Modules for stacking? Could someone post the compatible Cisco part numbers?

Thank you

BradenMcG-SHG · ‎02-01-2018

Stacking on the SG500s can work in either "chain" mode (single connection) or loop/ring mode, which is for redundancy. The stack ports don't behave like normal ports and spanning tree doesn't block even though there are two ports connected (and not a standard LAG / Port-channel). That said, I don't know if stacks actually utilize both links simultaneously -- when you are stacked, you lose all Etherlike statistics for the stack ports, which can be more than a little annoying (especially when trying to stack over 1Gb ports over longer distances).

You can also choose whether to stack using the 1G combo ports (NOT default setting, the ports closer to the center of the switch), or using the 5G/10G SFP slots on the far right.

The switch should allow you to stack via fiber as well, although I haven't actually done this in production (yet).

stacking SG500-28P switches

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