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I was always suspicious about self-hosted high availability solutions (typically just diagrams, not yet implemented) that included redundant switches. Given ho
by macintux 2y ago
I was always suspicious about self-hosted high availability solutions (typically just diagrams, not yet implemented) that included redundant switches.
Given how generally reliable switches are, I was inclined to believe that a misconfiguration or flaky network cable on one switch was more likely to cause a downtime (or significant degradation) than an outright switch failure, so adding another switch was doubling the chances of trouble and, as you note, making it harder to troubleshoot.
- toast0 2y agoIt kind of depends. You do get some weird stuff to debug, and more connections = more likely that one of them is broken. Otoh, if you ever do any scheduled maintenance on your switches (which is likely if they're doing anything fancy), having properly setup redundancy means you can announce a likely brief loss of redundancy, rather than a likely brief full loss of connectivity. If you have the right knobs, you can gracefully fail out the switch under maintenance and everything goes smoothly. Of course, sometimes you reboot the redundant switch and it confuses the other one and servers lose connectivity anyway.