Netgear M4300 - Spine and Leaf

Hi bbs2web,

My understanding of the leaf-spine (Spine & Leaf) CLOS network design is to ensure each point on the spine and leaf switches has multiple paths to another in the same layer. Spine switches should connect to each leaf, never another spine. Each leaf should also never connect to another leaf, only to the spine switches.

I also can not validate how intelligent Stacking is as we can't retrieve bandwidth counters via SNMP when changing ports to stack mode. Are there alternative SNMP OIDs available when ports are in stack mode?

I inquired your concern to the higher tier of NETGEAR Support and just got a feedback.  As per the higher tier of NETGEAR Support, while there is no SNMP object for stacking link, we have 'show stack-port counter' outputs that shows the traffic rate.

How does one confirm architecture and plan for upgrades and/or eradicate traffic polarisation without metrics without something as simple as SNMP?

As per the higher tier of NETGEAR Support, the NMS300 is recommended for ethernet port traffic but we have show stack-port counter to support the stack mode information. SNMP for stacking is more of a feature request. You may post your concern as feature request on the Idea Exchange Board for Business here.  

For more information about NMS300, kindly access the NMS300 product page here.

Regards,

DaneA

NETGEAR Community Team