Active Controller and Standby Controller Resets

If hitless stacking failover is enabled, when an active controller is reset or removed from the stack, the standby controller takes over immediately.

The stack behaves differently when a failover occurs depending on whether hitless-failover enable is configured. If it is not configured and the active controller is reset or removed from the stack, the standby reloads the entire stack. The standby reloads to become the active controller. If hitless-failover enable is configured, the standby takes over immediately without reloading any unit.

If both the active and the standby controllers are removed, the rest of the stack continues to function because the other stack members are operating on whatever is programmed in the hardware. However, the stack members are not able to learn any new addresses. In this case, the following message is displayed every few minutes.

Stack member is non-operational because of no Active or standby controller
You can recover to standalone mode by "stack unconfigure me"

Use the stack unconfigure me command to restore the units as standalone devices with a pre-stacking configuration.