White Papers

Stacking and VLT
Dell EMC Technical White Paper
1 Introduction
In this paper, we discuss and compare Stacking and Virtual Link Trunking (VLT) which allow us to physically
connect several Dell EMC devices so that they appear as single unit to a third device. VLT connects two devices
whereas stacking can connect more than two devices depending on the switch series. Both these techniques
provide multipathing which allows the administrators to create redundancy by increasing bandwidth and
providing active/active paths between devices.
Both these techniques aggregate two identical physical switches to form a single logical extended switch. In
stacking the control plane is unified, whereas in VLT the dual physical units form together as a single logical
unit, but the control and data plane of both switches remain isolated.