Interconnecting Switches with Virtual Chassis
Creation of a Virtual Chassis unit with interconnected EX series switches establishes a single unit that you can manage as though it were a single chassis. One switch member in the Virtual Chassis is the primary or master switch, and a second member is a backup that provides redundancy if the master member fails for some reason. The forwarding (and routing) tables remain synchronized with those of the master member. If a failover to the backup occurs, this member switch can immediately step in to continue the forwarding of traffic on the LAN.
Going virtual
As a basic example to illustrate interconnecting switches, consider a Virtual Chassis configuration where two EX series switches are interconnected.
If you use the default configuration, you connect the two switches with the dedicated 64-Gbps VCPs on the rear panel of the switch and power on the switches, and the Virtual Chassis is operational. Connect each of the two VCPs on the chassis member to a VCP on the other member. You don't have to configure these ports.
After you power on the two switches in the Virtual Chassis unit, the JUNOS software picks one of them to be the master (the other one becomes the backup) and assigns member IDs to each one. You can see this information on the switch's LCD display, which is on the front panel. The master will show Member ID: 0, Role: Master, and the backup will show Member ID:1, Role Backup.
If you want a particular switch to be the master, ...
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