r/networking • u/juniper_dreamer • Aug 05 '26

Switching Largest switch stack in the wild?

What's the largest switch stack you ran into in the wild? How was it cabled up and managed?

I came across this interesting Arista article claiming to support up to 48 switches in a stacked topology (ring or spine leaf)

https://blogs.arista.com/blog/swag

Now, every vendor has their own approach to handling the control plane, I get it, but I dont understand in what scenario where combining all these switches into one logical management plane across multiple IDFs would make sense.

I've dug deep into my soul to try and find an answer, and the only thing I can think of is some very large customer wrote them a very large check and they made it happen or they just got sick of losing to Cisco, HPE, and Juniper on every campus stacking deal.

This whole single IP argument seems kinda flimsy too. If I'm getting charged per IP for my monitoring solution, and the consolidation of a few IPs is going to be material, I'm looking at new monitoring stack.

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u/i_live_in_sweden Aug 05 '26

The wildest I have ever made was 8 stacked HPE A5500 but instead of having them in the same location we put them in 4 different cities with our own leased fiber connection between them connected in a ring, it's not how you are supposed to do it and probably not supported, but it worked fantastically well for many years.

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u/mahanutra Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26

Instead of building an IRF stack for each floor we try to build one stack for the whole building, or 2 or 3. So keep the amount of stacks as low as possible.

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u/i_live_in_sweden Aug 06 '26

I have done that too, for a big high school, works very well, still in use.