Configuring CISCO stacked switches at work | Best Practice | CISCO Stackwise and commands

previously on East charmer hello everyone welcome back to the channel and today's video is a continuation of our networking series and I made like three videos before this so if you haven't seen that please check that out as well where I unboxed configured and racked some Cisco switches but today's video is kind of different cuz we are going to be configuring a stacked switch so before I just configured one switch now we are going to do a stacked switch I'm going to talk about what a stack switch is and what Cisco uses for stacking switches also I'm going to be addressing some concerns from the comment section like why didn't I use the latest iOS for the switch and why did I use a configuration file instead of copying to the command line itself and such so if you're interested in this video and you want to see how we do it in real world and you want to know the reasons why we are doing this process at work then please keep on watching and without further Ado let's get started with today's video [Music] okay so before anything else just a disclaimer that what I'm showing here is what we actually realistically do in the workplace so I'm not going to be teaching how to configure a switch from scratch if that's what you want to see this is not what we going to do in here but how we actually do it in the workplace okay so I have prepped the first switch that we are going to use in here so the switch that I'm going to be working on has two stacks so I'm going to be needing another switch for [Music] this okay so this is our stacked switch it's just two switches on top of each other and we are using the Catalyst 93 148b upoe model for this so I'm probably going to skip a few steps in here for like configuring a switch if you want to see more detailed video about that I do have a video on that too that you can check out but now I think I'm going to talk more about the best practice on how to configure stack switches and how it's done I'm also going to talk about stackwise which is the infrastructure or the architecture that Cisco is using that's their I guess their own technology and stacking devices just like this so they do have they do come up with their own technology for networking and stackwise is the one that models like these are using so we stack switches because it provides a lot of advantages for us so stacking switches means that you can expand the switches Port density for example okay so for this one switch we do have 48 ports if you want to deploy a switch in a bigger company for example sometimes 48 ports is not enough so you might want to add another switch that has more ports so you would have like double the ports for that and if you have more devices too you can add more stack switches at the bottom as well okay so Cisco stackwise supports up to eight maximum switches so you can stack eight switches at the same time as a single like management switch also stacking switches can provide redundancy and resiliency as well for example you configure the first switch as the master switch and the second switch can be on standby mode okay all right so of course we're going to be needing to console into the switch so I haven't configured the switch yet but it's finished with the hardware initialization which is the first step on building switches so what I'm going to do is to configure this first switch first and later on I will connect the the second switch to the first switch also best practice here if you are doing a stack switches is to do one switch at a time instead of connecting them all together and configuring them all together Bas on our experience it takes a while to configure them all together because it will keep rebooting and loot looping into reboot cuz if one reboots the other one and the next ones will be rebooting as well so it's I think it's easier to just configure and finish one switch and then it will just copy whatever the configuration is so we prevent that reboot sessions for the switches it's much easier and faster also to console in this is the cable that I found this is not my preferred console cable but this is all I have for now that I can use this is like an adapter okay so this is called USB to RJ45 console cable so this is not a direct connection cuz you are going to need like a cat cable for this so this is a different cable from what I used from the last video and you have to plug it into the back of the Cisco switch to console in and this is not Plug and Play you have to install drivers for it so I do not recommend this if you are going to configure a switch but if you have no choice then it's fine okay so while I am configuring this first switch I'm also going to address some of the comments from the previous video so there was a comment in there that says why didn't I use the latest iOS for configuring the switch and to answer that there's always a reason why we do such things we don't just configure things in the real world in the real place just because that's what we want to do but because we have tested it already for months before we even tried to start configuring and deploying all of these switches if we are doing projects we usually have like a process of course we have to test it first carefully plan it first and to answer that question I'm sorry for the segue to answer that question why I didn't use the latest IOS is because we found a bug and a compatibility issue with the iOS with the poe so when we were testing our switch for the configuration we found out that when we have connected the access point point to the new Switch they weren't working well I mean they were powering on but they were not giving connections to any devices so our devices cannot connect to the access point and after a lot of research hours of research we found out that there is like a bug in the latest iOS software that has something to do with the poe okay so another question is why did I put the commands in the configuration file instead of copying them to the command line well realistically it's so much easier to just put it in a flash drive and copy it over especially if you have thousands of commands then just copying and pasting it imagine how tedious that would be and if we are deploying and building like 20 plus switches that would be a pain Plus in a lot of like businesses just like in our workplace we don't have in-house Network people like Network team it does almost everything in this building so we don't just build switches all all day to be realistic we do a lot of things of course we have to monitor like critical issues user support and other stuff we don't just do projects all the time so we can't do that we just can't be typing in or copying in the command manually one by one config file is one of the easiest way to do it so another disclaimer I'm not a network engineer yet and I'm not an expert on this but I'm just showing you the experience of how we are doing this all right so I'm going to show you other things that you will need when you are stacking switches and this is what we call the stack cable which is used to connect the two switches to make them stacked so this is what it looks like up close and you are going to be plugging this in at the back of the switch and you will be needing two for each switch so this is the back of the switches and as you can see right here where the slots are this is where we are going to be inserting the stack cables okay so when you're plugging this in best practice is make sure that they are criss cross so this is what it should look like if you plugged it into the second slot you should plug the other one into the first slot and vice versa this is more for redundancy so if one plane dies it should connect to the other one that is active Okay so now that I finished configuring the first switch that will be the master switch I am now going to power on the second switch and just plugging in the power cord since the first switch was already configured the other switch will take the configuration below from the primary switch so you you only have to copy the config files on the primary switch or the master switch and the other switches will become members of that master switch so for this part I really didn't have to do anything any config I just waited for the initialization for the hardware I didn't have to copy the files because the primary switch will automatically copy it over to the members okay so after it was finished configuring I just wanted to verify and make sure that the member or the second switch got the correct configuration from the primary switch and the primary switch can see all of the interfaces on the secondary switch so one of the ways I verify is by running the command show and Status so it will display all of the interfaces on the primary switch so as you can see it says gi10 that means that those are the interfaces for the primary switch you would see interfaces that says gi2 and that means that that is the interface for the second switch and now we can see the second switch which means that our stacking worked so that's how I configured stack switches at work it wasn't so bad as long as you did the primary first and you did it correctly I think everything all the members should be configured properly okay so that would be it for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed watching this I really enjoy making this kind of Hands-On video especially in the workplace so if you have any comments please leave them down below and I hope to see you guys in my next videos thank you so much for watching

Channel: East Charmer

Views: 10,862

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Id: 8Drd3FN7PMs

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023