Connecting Multipe Baseline Switches Together

[dflo16]

I have 5 Baseline Switches (2 X 2948, 3 X 2924) that are connected together. I currently have them daisy chained to each other running 1 cable between the first to the second, then one from the second to the third and so on. Bus topology. I think there is a better way to do this in more of a start topology running all the switches into one switch, also I want to use two cables from each switch to the hub (center)switch for fault tolerance and to increase bandwidth. I know I need to take advantage to Link Aggregration but I have no experience with this. Can somebody point me in the right direction or send me to a white paper or instructional doc?



Thanks.

[wolfgangB]

ad 1. linking switches

Linking serially/daisy chained or in parallel affects the bandwidth available to the linked switch. If you connect all 4 switches to the same fifth switch, then each gets the maximum downlink bandwidth.

Which is 100 or 1000 mbps, depending on port type.

I'd prefer this setup for redundancy also: if daisy chained, and one 'lower' switch fails, all switches behind that go offline as well.

ad 2. aggregated links a.k.a. trunks

This is one of the simplest configuration options on any 3Com switch. You first "create" an AL, enumerating from 1, and then you "add ports" to it. This is done in the web GUI usually by simply clicking on the ports. I have no idea what a 2948/2924 looks like :) but if it features ALs at all, it works like this.



- w-b