I tried to use search with some non conclusive results… the most closest is post from 2021 that mikrotik does not support stacking and the closest to that is some magic that is not the most reliable…
So anything changed ?
Does mikrotik support stacking ?
I want to have 2 switches in the stack (stack-switch01, that composes of switch01-1 and switch01-2). the first sfp of both ports will go to the remote switch 02 , and second sfp port on both switch will go to the switch03
AFAIK the closest thing to stacking, supported by Mikrotik (ROS in particular), is port extender. IMO it’s pretty poor approximation, but I guess there are use cases for port extender as well.
It’s arguably better than stacking, when used correctly. Look at Cisco Nexus port extenders and Catalyst 6800 Instant Access switches, for instance. Can make your entire infra look like a single switch, which most stacking inplementations cannot do due to distance limitations.
Well, distance between CB/PE can indeed be much longer. But that’s about the only thing better than in traditional stacking. Stacking interface is one thing, switching performance is another thing. Both really suck in CB/PE setup because all switching is performed by CB (even if communicating devices are both connected to the same PE) which both overloads CB switching engine and interconnect links. Not to mention that stacking interfaces are usually faster than fastest of the rest of interfaces.
Not trying to resurrect an old thread, but this is the top result in Google, so I wanted to surface this for folks looking in the future:
CRS3xx, CRS5xx series switches, and CCR2116, CCR2216 devices are all capable of MC-LAG (Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Group), which is almost stacking. (Distributed switching, but also distributed configuration planes.)
MLAG is a very different thing than stacking. For one, it requires end devices to use LAGs towards the "stack". Another one: MLAG peer link can become a serious bottlebeck for similar reasons as for CB/PE links. And not to mention single control plane of proper stacks.
At the end of the day: It all comes down to why you were staking in the first place, and I'd argue that MC-LAG handles quite a few of those use cases.
If I'm not mistaken: Non-LAG interfaces will still populate the ARP table and allow traffic to flow between peers via the peer-port, provided VLAN memberships are correct. Even a stack will have chassis-to-chassis bandwidth constraints to consider, but MC-LAG can use a bonded link between peers, so you can somewhat mitigate bottlenecks there too.
It would be neat if Mikrotik had a CRS with a bunch of SFP+ alongside 2 or 4 40+ Gbps links for doing this very sort of setup.
We currently use HPE switches with IRF stacking. You can stack up to 9 switches of the same switching series. Imagine a 48 Gigabit switch with 4 SFP+ Ports. You connect one of those 10 GbE port from switch 1 to switch 2, from switch 2 to 3, … from switch 9 to switch 1. So you have a ring topolgy. All links are used. One switch is the master switch, the rest are slaves. The master switch controls everything. When the master switch fails, one of the slave switches takes over.
You can physically use LACP with e. g. one port from switch 1, one from switch 3 and one from switch 7 to get an IEEE 802.3ad bond working to another external device.
This old school stacking is used in all of our buildings. Unfortunately MikroTik doesn’t support it, so we won’t buy Mikrotik’s switches for client access.
@MikroTik You could have a lot of more switches sold, If you’d support stacking
This is exactly how we do this with D-Link too. But it seems this is too “straight forward” for MT. They need everything overcomplicated and overcomplex. I would never ever use MT and their MLAG and/or PortExtender stuff. No, never, god no!!
Well, this simple LACP only works when switches are properly configured.
Most vendors use their (proprietary) stacking and their UI makes things easy.
ROS uses MLAG which in theory should be standard and should offer interworking between compliant switches from different vendors. But as most of times with ROS, UI is a nightmare and implementation sucks as well.
Another things that normal stacking offers but MLAG doesn't is common UI to configure all swithc ports in such stack. The closest thing MT came to it was "port extender", but that one had a huge performance bottleneck (master switch did all the switching, hence interconnects were used for every single frame passing between two ports of such "stack").
Which means that one has to configure LACP bond on "switch side" on two different devices of same MLAG group. Yeah, let's talk about possibility to screw something up due to typos.