Stack Managed Switches over a distance
- by Joel Coel
We have several buildings with stacked switches, where the distance between the stacked units is considerable... separate floors, or at opposite ends of a hallway. They are 3Com switches that stack using cat6 cabling. These switches are coming up on 12 years old now, and as I look around at replacements it seems no one supports this scenario any more. Stacking switches want to use fiber links (it more for me to run and terminate the fiber stacking cables than to purchase the switch) or other custom cables that seem only intended to jump up to the next unit in a rack.
What have others done to support stacking over a distance? I'm considering breaking up the stacked switches into separate managed entities and just bridging from the root switch in the buildings, but I'd really like to avoid that for what I hope are obvious reason.
The closest thing I've found are from netgear that use hdmi cables for the stacking connection... I could try to support that by running an additional cat6 line and re-terminating both links into a single hdmi port, but I have concerns over that approach as well.
