Master stack switch turn off

Question

I have two switches in a stack. One is master and the other is a slave. If I turn off the slave, the master will work with no problem. My questions:

• if I turn off the master, will the slave still work, will the stack switch work normally, or I will have a downtime of the entire stack?
• once the master switch that we turned off previously is turned on again, will be the master again?! I think it should be re-elected as master as the priority number of this switch is higher then the priority number of the slave.
• Will the vlan database should not be affected by loosing the master?

Answer 1

This is true of Cisco Catalyst and as far as I know all Cisco switches:

If you already have made both switches stack members, the slave switch should be elected to master if the current master becomes unavailable.

I believe the original master will be reelected upon a power cycle of the stack, or just the slave I suppose, assuming the original master is again online/available.

From cisco.com:

When is the stack master elected?

-When the whole switch stack is reset

-When the stack master is reset or powered off

Note: If you reset the stack master, it would reset the whole stack.

-When the stack master is removed from the stack

-When the stack master switch has failed

Within these events, the current stack master has a greater chance to get re-elected.

Answer 2

Yes, you are correct on the priority number. As long as the master switch is set to a higher priority than the member, you should be fine when your master switch is powered on and comes back online in regards to VLAN database.

I am going to assume you have redundant uplinks configured on both switches A and B. If switch B doesnt have redundant uplinks and master switch A goes offline, switch B will be of no good.

HTH Rez