Stacking HPE 5130 Switches

The switches used in this example are HP 5130s.

WHAT ARE STACKED SWITCHES?

Stacked switches are multiple switches connected together in a cluster to appear as a single logical device. The benefits to this is ease of management with less IP addresses to document as well as redundancy as you can have multiple uplinks so if a link does go down, clients can go over the additional uplinks.

You can even use link aggregation on the uplinks to simplify spanning-tree topologies as well as load balance traffic up to the distribution layer switches.

MY LAB

Below is an example of the lab I am using for this. It's two HPE 5130s with stacking cables connected to the Ten-GigabitEthernet ports. The image below is of the stack completed.

The cables are connected last, once all the configuration is in place you then slot in the stacking cables.

CONFIGURING THE FIRST SWITCH

The first switch is the top one, it will need to be numbered to represent it's position in the stack (as it's the top switch it will be switch 1). You can use the command 'display irf' to show the IRF topology. AS the screenshot below shows, switch 1 is already set as Member 1.

Now that it is numbered correctly, the stacking ports need configuring. First you need to shutdown the ports you will be using, in this case Ten-Gig 1/0/49 and Ten-Gig 1/0/50, then assign them to an IRF port.

You create the IRF ports using the command 'irf-port <switch-num>/<port-num>' so I will be using irf-port 1/1 and 1/2. You define which physical port(s) you want to be part of that IRF port then once all your physical ports are associated with an IRF port, bring those ports back up.

Once the ports are ready, you can enable IRF on the switch using the command below. I will save the configuration and reboot it.

CONFIGURING THE SECOND SWITCH

Now this is the second switch therefore it needs to be renumbered as switches by default will be set as member 1. I can confirm this by using the 'display irf' command and then renumber the switch using the command shown below. You will need to save you changes then reboot the switch for the change to take affect.

After the reboot, I can check the IRF topology again to see it has now updated to be member 2.

Now, like before the switch will need it's ports setting up so shutdown the physical ports being used for stacking, set up the IRF port and associate the physical ports with that IRF port then bring them back up. Finally the IRF fabric is enabled to complete the setup of switch 2.

CONNECTING THE SWITCHES

With the configuration being set on each switch, all that is left is for the stacking cables to be connected. You need to push them in until they click into place and then the stack will automatically form. Some switches may reboot, typically the non-master switches will reboot. Once it is all back up, you can check the IRF topology and you should see both switches present.