Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Advice for a newbie on configuring an active/active setup

Hi Guys!

Hope you are all well.

I have a quick question with regards to configuring our core switches in the best way possible!

A little background on the network.... We have 1 Fortigate 80E firewall sat at the edge of the network which handles all routing to the WAN and Internet. Connected to this is an Edgeswith 48 port PoE which subsequently has 8 access switches connected out on banks of desks. This switch also has 9 Unifi Ap's connected which it does not provide PoE power to (we have concerns as to the reliability of the Edgeswitches PSU's when put under stress from PoE)

Here is a rough diagram of our network I drew up....

https://app.lucidchart.com/invitations/accept/7a05f290-c1c6-44c9-b516-0dd6a342da7d

We are hoping to add in another Edgeswitch to work alongside the current one so that they could share the load going out to the access switches and AP's

What would be the best way to configure an active/active setup while also having an additional switch to replace a failed one. What would be the best way to configure redundancy? Ideally having some sort of automatic failover system.

My thoughts so far were that we would have both switches connected to the FortiGate firewall and then connected to each other (one of the switches link to the firewall would be redundant in case the other switch went down) We would also split the load of access switches etc between the two core switches. We could then have another switch ready to hot-swap in case of failure? Or even better is there a way to have an additional switch setup to automatically failover onto? or would we need an extra switch for both switches? I do not believe Unifi's Edge switches are stackable as well, or at least not logically.

Our objective is to have a situation where 2 switches share the load and in the event, one fails, another can take its place as quickly as possible, allowing for an active/active with redundancy setup.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated! :D

Kind regards

Oliver



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