Can you daisy chain unmanaged switches

Can I chain them all together without stupid things happening? My gut says "yes", but it's been wrong before. Hat Monster wrote: I have eight four-port gigabit switches, the small unmanaged type.

Don't create a loop, and I wouldn't suggest a long serial chain if you can avoid it. It should be fine, but like topham said, the more star like you can make it the better. So a topology with two "central" switches linked to each other and the other six plugging into those.

Hat Monster wrote: So a topology with two "central" switches linked to each other and the other six plugging into those. Switches 1 and 2 can be connected with one connection only , and then switches can be subtended off of them. You also have to make absolutely sure that 1 does not connect physically to and 2 does not connect to , or that do not connect together. I checked network utilization on the server when looking at the network traffic from one computer, the utilization was about 0.

Home-runs are not an option due to exceeding gig network cable lengths ft and fiber would be much too costly. So, I know that it's not recommended to daisy chain network switches, but I haven't read anywhere hard and fast that says you can't do it. Further, there is no other traffic on this network other then those computers which send small amounts of data over the network to the server.

Besides not being recommended for a standard office network which this is not , will we run into any major issues? There are no hard limit on daisy-chaining switches.

I had a layer 2 network once where a PC at one end of the network, reaching a server at the other end could easily go via about a dozen switches. But there is a practical limit depending on hardware and your network needs. How many can you daisy chain depends on what's happening on your network and the quality of your switches.

A "gigabit switch" doesn't mean a thing really. How much packets can that switch process? How much bandwidth can the switch forward? Also, what's the network traffic? Assuming the traffic is only to the server, with what you posted, I wouldn't be afraid, but I would make sure to use good quality switches.

One thing to keep in mind is what I personally call the "inverted funnel". If you have PCs mostly sending traffic to a specific point, you can, by daisy chaining arrive to the situation where you have something like this:. So in the example above, if every PC is downloading 10M from the server, how much traffic is going through switch3? So if all the links above were M links, then you would choke. The above is what I call a "funnel design". The inverted funnel design would require that the bandwidth between switch1 and switch2 be enough to carry the expected load from all the nodes connected to switch1.

Then the link to switch3 from switch2 would have to be enough to carry the load of switch2 and switch1, etc. So the link between the switches would have to be greater than the link from the nodes to switch. Example: 24xM ports switch has 2 x 1G connection to next switch.

That being obviously based on expected bandwidth usage, not the port speed. If you have gigabit ports but all nodes are using only a few Kbps, then it may take a bit to saturate - bandwidth-wise. There isn't really any limits about connecting switches, but you should be aware that there is limits of the spanning tree protocol is limited to 7 hops. Twenty switches between two systems seems unusually large, you probably should consider breaking things up into VLANs at that point.

You can do this using the layer 3 features of a switch even. Option 1: As long as you are using switches especially on such a low-load network , it should just work. Hubs would cause trouble, but that is not your case.

This way you need just a few fibers and still retain reasonable chaining. Option 3 inspired by Zoredache: get L3 switches and just route L3 switch everything. IP is designed to deal with even higher numbers of hops. Switch stack is to combine multiple switches to make them work together for the purpose of providing as many ports as possible. Multiple switches are stacked to form a stack unit.

And When stacking multiple switches together, the port density of a stack unit is the sum of the combined ports, greatly increasing the network connectivity. For example, stack two ST4S stackable Gigabit switch together, which then can provide 48 1GbE port density and nearly get twice switching capacity on the basis of one single switch stack.

Usually, S series switches can support up to 6 switches stacked together. Switch cluster can manage the multiple interconnected switches as a single logical device. Switch cascade and stack are prerequisites for cluster. In a cluster, there is usually only one administrative switch, called a command switch, which can manage other switches.

In a network, these switches require just one IP address only for the command switch, which saves valuable IP addresses resources. Figure 5: a command switch and several member switches in a switch cluster unit. Traditional cascading Ethernet switch daisy-chain topology or star topology , as well as advanced switch stacking and switch clustering, are three ways to connect multiple network switches.

Then which is the best? You need to know their differences first. The table below shows the differences among switch cascade vs switch stack vs switch cluster, which will give you a better understanding of their respective properties.