I am building a network with stacked switches for redundancy. The problem I have is that some of the machines connected to the network will only have one available network card. This card is not a dual port card so I will only have one port.
Do I have pseudo-network fault tolerance with a simple unmanaged switch? The reason I am doing this is because there are many machines on the network and if a managed switch goes down, all the machines should not go with it. If the unmanaged switch goes down it will only take the local machines access with it.
Best Answer
No. What you are proposing is to create a loop in your network with an unmanaged switch and then hoping it understands spanning-tree, or hoping that it forwards spanning-tree through itself so the two upstream managed switches can work out that there is a loop and block one of their downstream ports.
Best case for single-NIC servers is a highly available network switch (dual power supplies, possibly dual supervisors and/or some type of ISSU). Or you can add a second NIC or create some type of HA cluster with another single-NIC server attached to a different switch.