Cisco 3750X Switch stack best practices

Question

I have a stack of 5 Cisco 3750Xs. I am debating between taking all my servers and putting them on one of the 5 switches, or distributing them over the first few ports of all 5 switches? All of the servers need to talk to the other servers.

My only thought is that if I distribute the ports across the stack, too much traffic will be passing between the switches via the stackwise cables as the servers are constantly attempting to talk to each other.

If this helps, we only have one uplink connection to our ISP at this point, but our servers tend to take care of requests locally before having to traverse outside the network.

Answer 1

I am debating between taking all my servers and putting them on one of the 5 switches, or distributing them over the first few ports of all 5 switches?

Best thing to do is distribute them over all five switches.If you config on one switch there may be downtime if any failure on that specific switch.

if I distribute the ports across the stack, too much traffic will be passing between the switches via the stack wise cables as the servers are constantly attempting to talk to each other.

No It is not true. When you use Stack you can use load balancing techniques. Then there will not be additional traffic.

If VSS functionalities available on your switch(i don't think, it is available on your switch) It will be more flexible than Stack...

Answer 2

If what is important to you with this server is the availability and the uptime of the server, you should distribute the ports across the stack so if a switch goes down, you don't lose connection to your server.

Also, I don't think the stack modules would be overloaded by the traffic at all.

If you choose to put all the cables from the server in one switch, you have a chance of having a downtime if the switch goes down.