Best method for connecting up multiple 1920 switches

[PD27]

Good afternoon,

My company is planning on opening a new hub office which will be substancially bigger than anything we currently have.  Normally we have two HP V1910 switches connected via an RJ45 uplink cable but for the new office we are looking a running four HPE OfficeConnect 1920-48G-PoE switches to accomodate all the connections.  The switches will all be residing in the same comms room for ref.

My question is for some advice on how best to interlink these four switches please.  We could interlink all the switches to one with RJ45 cables but I am wondering if using the inbuilt SFP ports would be a better way to do this

If anyone can advise on the best solution it would be much appreicated

Regards

[parnassus]

If you're stick with using (forced to use) specifically the HPE OfficeConnect 1920 Switch series (PoE/non PoE models, doesn't matter)...and you want to preserve as much 1GbE ports as possible (so 48 at least)...you are forced to use some SFP Tranceivers (optical/copper, it's up to your requirements) in order to uplink yours four units together via Links Aggregation Group AKA Port Trunking (I mean: by forming an open loop chain made of your 4 1920 switches interconnected by using 2 links - a LAG with Dynamic LACP - between any two of them...without closing the loop...so you will need a grand total of 12 SFP Transceivers - so 6 pairs - and 6 patch cables - so 3 pairs):

A[2] = [2]B[2] = [2]C[2] = [2]D

Where letter A, B, C and D represents a Switch, [n] represents the number n of SFP Transceivers aggregated together [] on each Switch, finally = stands for dual physical links (optical/copper) logically aggregated together in a LAG.

A single link could suffice you would say (so 6 SFP Transceivers and just 3 patch cords), a pair of links aggregated together is naturally better IMHO (inter-Switch links inherit resiliency and inter-switch traffic load balancing).

If you have an heavier budget other valid options (to do real true stacking, not simple uplinking logically separated units) are to use HPE OfficeConnect 1950 (true IRF stacking capable - on SFP+ or 10GBase-T ports - since it runs on Comware 7, up to four IRF stack members) or Aruba 2920 (hardware backplane stacking capable with dedicated stacking modules and stacking cables, see QuickSpecs and Aruba 2920 Stacking Technical Guide for details) or Aruba 2930F (VFS frontplane stacking capable with 16.03, with up to 4 members, no special Hardware modules/cables are required...as per the HPE 1950).

It's also a matter of staying on the Comware side or on the ArubaOS-Switch side (ProVision rebranded)...I'm speaking about Switch OS.

Clearly those above alternative options are probably more expensive (to be verified with similar configurations)...but features and benefits are differents.

[Dunky]

In addition to what Parnassus has recommended, I would then create a 2-member LAG between A and D to complete a loop to give you redundancy should one of the switches fail, and then use STP to block one of the uplinks.

I have a similar setup at one of our clients sites using 1920's.