Bill,
With the right amount of prep work and understanding of how the
stacking works, you can control everything you complained about.
I complained about the same stuff until I read the document that
explains how to:
1) Renumber a switch in the cluster (and all of it's interfaces with it)
2) Hot swap a new switch into the cluster
3) - and this one's sweet - upgrade the s/w on the entire cluster in one
shot, even if they're different models
4) Control which switch is the master so that adding a new switch to the
stack doesn't chance screwing up your configs.
5) Permanently remove all stacking config from the switch
The actual backplane has lived up performance wise in the testing I've
done, but I haven't come anywhere near testing it to 32gbps.
Just the same as thousands of people have wiped out every VLAN on their
network by putting in a switch with a higher VTP revision number with no
VLANs defined, it takes a learning curve to work well with these
suckers.
Granted - the software has been somewhat buggy - but those aren't the
merits I'm debating.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/hw/switches/ps5023/products
_configuration_guide_chapter09186a00801a6558.html