Switching

My customer wants to span his virtual chassis across two data centres 15 km apart. What is the maximum distance you can have between members of a virtual chassis?

Brian,  I think its 40km,,,

According to the EX Virtual Chassis Best Practices Guide it is up to 50km.

 

http://kb.juniper.net/index?page=content&id=TN31&cat=SWITCHING&actp=LIST

 

Few lines from the Best practices guide regarding the Maximum Distance between members in Virtual chassis..

 

Interconnecting Members in a Virtual Chassis Configuration
A Virtual Chassis configuration consists of between two and 10 EX 4200 series switches connected together through Virtual Chassis ports. Configurations can range from a deployment in which each switch is physically collocated, to a deployment in which switches are separated by up to 70 km and connected via fiber optics. Each switch within a Virtual Chassis configuration is a member of that Virtual Chassis configuration.

 

http://www.juniper.net/solutions/literature/implementationguides/801018.pdf

 

 

It looks like there are multiple answers in the guides.  One says 50km while the other states 70km.  A Virtual Chassis can be created over the SFP/SFP+ ports up to the maximum transmission distance catered for by the SFP or SFP+ optic.

are there latency caveats on this also..?  (apart from maxm optical distance)...

There are no latency caveats involved.

 

Thanks.

ISTR reading somewhere that there must not be any MAC level devices (repeaters?) in the VC paths due to non-standard ethernet frames...