Installation guide

AT-8000 Series Fast Ethernet Switches Installation Guide

Enhanced

Stacking

This feature is designed to simplify network management. You can use

the feature to manage all the AT-8000 Series Fast Ethernet Switches that

reside in a subnet on your network from just one management session.

Before the advent of enhanced stacking, managing a switch meant that

you had to establish a separate management session with it. This often

involved going to the wiring closet where the switch was located and

establishing the session through the RS232 management port on the

switch.

If you wanted to manage your switches remotely from a workstation on

your network using the Telnet application protocol or a web browser,

you had to assign each switch a unique IP address. And when you were

finished managing one switch, you had to end the management session

in order to manage another switch, even if the switches were in the

same subnet.

The enhanced stacking feature simplifies all this. The benefits of this

feature include:

# You can manage all the AT-8000 Series switches in a subnet from

one management session, even if the switches are physically

separated by large distances. This eliminates the need of having

to initiate a separate management session with each switch.

# The AT-8000 Series Switches in a subnet can share the same IP

address, reducing the number of IP addresses that you need to

assign to the network devices that you want to manage from a

remote workstation.

# Remotely managing a new switch in your network is simplified.

Once the switch is connected to the network, the stacking feature

will detect the switch, allowing you to immediately begin to

manage it from any workstation in your network.

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when planning this feature for

your network:

# There can be only one stack in each subnet in your network.

# A stack cannot span subnets.

# There must be at least one AT-8000 Series Switch in each subnet

with an IP address and subnet mask.

# To initiate a management session on the AT-8000 Series Switches

in a subnet, you start it on a switch that has the IP address. Once

the session is started, you have management access to all the

AT-8000 Series Switches in the subnet.