@parnassus wrote:
I'm totally at lost with your line of reasoning (especially when you compare new Aruba Switch Series with the old HP ProCurve 2900): I *suspect* you're confusing the general feature of Management Stacking (probably available on old HP ProCurve 2900 like in many others) with Virtual Switching (again, deployed in two flavours: frontplane stacking versus backplane stacking implementation), there is no reason to refer or compare to old HP ProCurve 2900 every time you cross the word stacking or stack if *here* in this thread we are speaking about Virtual Switching (so a way to form a real virtual switch, a single logical entity, by stacking its members together in a way or another) and not Management Stacking [*].
Hope not to be wrong in interpreting what are your doubts.
Forget about HP ProCurve 2900.
With Virtual Switch you *should* multi home your Servers so you will protect their connectivity against any stack member fault.
[*] A side note: once you have a Virtual Switch set up and running, management is performed against the logical entity...from there you can control the whole stack that appears as a "big" omogeneous switch.
Yes thanks.. sorry i was just double checking on things. I understand the general principal here.. i was just confused as to what the older tech did vs the newer (more curiousity).
I've pretty much settled on getting refurbished 2920's for our office.. at least a stack of 4 of them as an entity.. then the other 3 tied into it.. 5 of 7 are regular, while 2 will need to be POE for our phones. I feel that limiting it to 4 in the stack for now, should save around $240 x 3 for the stacking cards. Models J9729A poe and J9728A non poe. Pricing is about 1160 for the poe and $793 for the non POE refurbished
I believe the stacking module is the J9733A for around $220 (needing 4, for the 4 stack plus 4 cables J9734A 0.5m or a 3 foot version for the ring setup? unsure what the link rate is considered here?)
I guess from a logistics standpoint now, i need to decide what the best approach is here..
With 192 workstation drops, maybe 50-75 hardware/server drops and needing 72 of these POE.. if the 4 stack plus 3 routed into the main core makes sense.. then the 3 into the core (star) would obviously have no redundancy for now at least. I'm guessing for the 4 in the stack i'd put the 2 POE switches and 2 regular covering all workstations/phones.
I was considering the 2930M as well, but the cost seems too high (no refurb options).
Is there maybe a layer2 hp switch i could use for these satellite 3 switches instead of the 2920 to save cost but keep things in the same ballpark spec/brand wise?
**edit, actually, in seeing the JL254A 2930F, appears can be had for $995 and requires no stackable cards, i'm not positive if this model has the 1gb uplink or 10 etc for the stacking ability? (may be cheaper to go this route?), and appears $1500 for the POE version JL262A? (actually it ends up the 2930F combo is around $800 more than going with 2920s but they could all be put into two stacks from the start, though this is similar to just buying 3 more stacking cards for the 2920 from the start)