Benefits of VSF
- Simplified topology and easy management
- A VSF fabric appears and behaves as one logical switch and is accessible by the network through a single IP address.NOTE:
Spanning tree features are not necessary among VSF members.
- 1:1 redundancy
One member acts as the commander to manage and control the entire VSF fabric. One of the switches acts as a standby and backs up the commander, and takes over in case of commander failure.
- VSF port aggregation
A VSF link can aggregate upto eight VSF ports with the immediate neighboring member. This provides redundancy till failure of seven VSF ports.
- Distributed trunking
The Ethernet link aggregation feature can be used to aggregate physical links between the VSF and its upstream or downstream devices across the VSF members. This eliminates the need for spanning tree and also provides load balancing across all ports of the link aggregate.
- Network scalability
The processing power is equal to the Commander, the forwarding capacity is equal to all the stack members combined.