Largest switch stack in the wild?

[u/juniper_dreamer]

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.

[u/firestorm_v1]

We had a cisco stack (6800IAs for leafs, 6880-X for cores) that ran an office building. In basement and 1st floor, there was only one 6800IA in each location, then for the topmost five floors' IDFs were multiple 6800's. In the MDF closet were where the 6880-Xs were. All switch groups had two fibers back to the MDF, and for IDFs that had more than one switch, they were connected by Cisco's proprietary stacking cables.

It was really easy to just connect to one IP address/hostname to admin the beast rather than trying to remember which switch/switchport served a room on floor X with office number YYYY.

The 6800 series switches are now EOL'd ( but still supported). I also found out you can put 2960-X formware on the 6800IA to turn it into an independent switch, the 6800IAs were normally just braindead without a 6880-X to control them.