Replacing TOR switches
Our VXRail environment consists of 3 hosts, a SAN, and 2 Dell S4128T switches set up for redundancy with VLT. The switches are end of life and will be out of support so we plan to replace them with 2 Cisco Catalyst 9300s. Two things we are evaluating:
- Should the Cisco switches be set up in a stack or set up independently with the use of something like stackwise virtual or VMWare ESXi NIC teaming/failover to create redundancy? The stack seems to make the most sense outside of the times when we need to take it down for maintenance, firmware upgrades, etc. It seems the whole environment would come down if they are managed under one plane.
- Whichever option we choose: how should the actual changeover take place from old switches to new? It would be nice to do it without having to shut the entire environment down but I am not sure that is possible.