My TN Connection

Network administrators may wish to manage multiple Ethernet switches via a single IP address.  The reasoning for this is if they have a rack of switches and don’t want to remember multiple IP addresses or if they need to reduce the number of IP addresses for devices that are being deployed in their network.

While there is no standard for managing multiple Ethernet switches via a single IP address most manufactures do offer managed switches with this capability.   Some of the names you may see and hear for this concept are Switch Clustering, IP Stacking and Virtual Stack Management to name a few.  The concept is the same across the various manufactures, but it may be implemented in a different manner so you can not manage multiple vendors’ switches via a single IP address since this is not an IEEE standard and each manufacture implements this in a proprietary manner. continue »