Hi,I'm trying to find out how two Powerconnect 6224 switches behave when stacked together for a iSCSI SAN.From what I have read, in a stack, there is one Master and the other a standby. If the Master fails it takes some time to failover to the standby switch.This could be fatal for the running Virtual Machines on the ESX hosts as they would loose connection to the SAN storage.Could someone explain if the above is correct ?
Or should the two switches be setup as stand alone, with paths to each switch from the storage and hosts, which would mean in case of failour of one switch the other one keeps working and hence no downtime.
Thanks for any info.
Yes, there would be delay for the remaining switch to give-up, reboot, and come up as the master.
If you're using the pair for SAN redundancy, I'd recommend leaving the switches separate, but connect them with multiple cables (either in a LAG for redundancy+resiliency, or just for redundancy with RSTP). I do this, and can reload one switch at a time, without locking-up the VMs.