Electing a Commander

In cases where the Commander of the stack is not identified as described in this section, the stack undergoes a Commander Election process. This occurs when the entire stack is rebooted simultaneously, such as during a building power failure recovery or when the stack becomes split and the Commander is isolated in the Inactive fragment, requiring the Active fragment to elect a new Commander.

All the switches go through discovery and election at the same time. The election timer is set for 60 seconds and if no new switches are discovered during that timeout period, the switches in the stack enter the election process.

During the election process, for each group of switches with the same STACK-ID (they should all be the same), these steps occur:

1. The switches with the highest Stack Revision are discovered.

2. The switch with the highest configured priority is selected as the Commander.

3. If there are switches with the same “highest” priority, the switch that was the previous Commander is selected.

4. If no switches were previous commanders, the switch that was the previous Standby is selected.

5. If none of the above conditions apply, the switch with the lowest MAC Address is selected as the Commander.