I'm trying to create as much redundancy as possible with the hardware we have and here is how I have everything configured:
We have a pair of stacked force10 S55 switches that is our core. Then at each of our 4 cabinets we have a pair of Cisco 2960-S switches that have a single cable back to our core. as an example:
cabinet1 2960-sw1 -> force10-sw1 2960-sw2 -> force10-sw2
My questions are these:
- Is it recommended to connect each pair of 2960 together? (These 2960s do not do stacking)
- Is it best practices to connect each cabinet switch to BOTH s55 in the core? so that if one fails we don't need to loose one entire switch at each cabinet.
- Most of our servers are connected to each of the 2960 in its cabinet and using a bond for this connection in a active-backup mode. I would love to connect these with a active-active but from what I have read this is not possible when the switches are not stacked and when I have tried I see warnings that the MAC keeps switching ports.