How many switches can be cascaded

The cascading of switches is to send and receive reversed ports for connection to standard straight-through cable internal switches. For example, plug one switch uplink port into the standard port of another switch to help expand the network.

When connecting two devices, use only the uplink port of one of the devices. If you use a straight-through cable to connect two The uplink port has the same result as using two regular ports and cannot communicate properly. Switch stacking can be deployed in a limited space, providing higher density ports and space savings, and powerful management features have proven to be the most cost-effective alternative to the underlying high-end switches.

However, stacking is only applicable to switches that can be stacked in the same series of the same vendor, and the link distance is limited by the length of the stack cable. Assuming the traffic is only to the server, with what you posted, I wouldn't be afraid, but I would make sure to use good quality switches.

One thing to keep in mind is what I personally call the "inverted funnel". If you have PCs mostly sending traffic to a specific point, you can, by daisy chaining arrive to the situation where you have something like this:. So in the example above, if every PC is downloading 10M from the server, how much traffic is going through switch3?

So if all the links above were M links, then you would choke. The above is what I call a "funnel design". The inverted funnel design would require that the bandwidth between switch1 and switch2 be enough to carry the expected load from all the nodes connected to switch1.

Then the link to switch3 from switch2 would have to be enough to carry the load of switch2 and switch1, etc. So the link between the switches would have to be greater than the link from the nodes to switch. Example: 24xM ports switch has 2 x 1G connection to next switch. That being obviously based on expected bandwidth usage, not the port speed. If you have gigabit ports but all nodes are using only a few Kbps, then it may take a bit to saturate - bandwidth-wise.

There isn't really any limits about connecting switches, but you should be aware that there is limits of the spanning tree protocol is limited to 7 hops. Twenty switches between two systems seems unusually large, you probably should consider breaking things up into VLANs at that point.

You can do this using the layer 3 features of a switch even. Option 1: As long as you are using switches especially on such a low-load network , it should just work. Hubs would cause trouble, but that is not your case. This way you need just a few fibers and still retain reasonable chaining. Option 3 inspired by Zoredache: get L3 switches and just route L3 switch everything.

IP is designed to deal with even higher numbers of hops. Although this may not be an option if you are using broadcasts, multicasts, or some exotics. Short of what was already mentioned by Zoredache and ETL; the only other thing I would consider when daisy-chaining network switches is the consideration of how large you want to extend a single broadcast domain within your network. This was more of an addendum.

I doubt you would see any timing, processor or routing issues. Those are usually router issues and wouldn't be caused by excessive switches.

A process known as daisy-chaining allows you to connect as many switches together as you wish, however, this is not recommended as it does come with the risk of creating a loop if they are not connected correctly.

In regards to a direct connection to the router, the number of switches you can connect is simply limited by the number of Ethernet ports built into the router itself. My recommendation would be to instead replace the multiple switches with a single switch that has more than enough ports than needed whilst allowing for future expansion.

This way, only one port on the router will be consumed for a switch, and a 24 or 48 port switch will be more than is ever needed for many home networks.

If you absolutely have to use multiple switches, I would suggest connecting each switch to its own port on the router instead of daisy-chaining them together. Home Network Geek is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.

Terms and Conditions. Privacy Policy. Contents hide. Affiliate Disclosure. Learn More. Normally, we combine several Ethernet switches together to meet our needs port number, certain functions, etc. Then how to connect multiple Ethernet switches in networking?

In general, there are three main technologies: switch cascade, switch stack and switch cluster. This article aims to elaborate on three technologies and the best way among them in switch to switch connection. Cascading switch is a traditional way to connect multiple Ethernet switches , which comes with various methods involving diverse network topologies. By cascading more than one switch together, users can have multiple ports interconnecting each of the switches, all of which can be configured and managed independently in the group.

Among the switch cascade network, daisy chain topology and star topology are two common ways. Daisy chain topology, as its name implies, connects each switch in series to the next like the petals of a daisy.

It is the simplest way to add more switches in a network. The structure of daisy chain network switches can be linear where the switches at both ends are not connected, figure 1 which can be simply described as A-B-C, or circular where the switches at both ends are not connected, figure 2 which can be simply described as A-B-C-D-E-F-A.