In this session, Our focus will be to learn about the existing and new High Availability features present on the Catalyst 9k Switches. We have a pair of Cisco Cat 9500 - 16x with network essential license, we don't have a budget to upgrade the license to Network Advantage. However, I have a design dilemma right now. This is basically vrrp A Stacked CORE switch is a control plane single point of failure. The first step would be to un-stack them and as you suggested running VRRP/HSRP is probably. SW1 & SW2 are my switches (3750E) and form a stack (the drawn links are stack cables). SW3 & SW4 are independend customer switches (Avaya) and are physically connected with ethernet cables Chalange: I need to deliver a redundante connections to the LAN. All I can find are options to direct manage to each switch IP, FortiGate Fortilink (but still each switch) or FortiManager. What i'm looking for is a similar way Cisco do the stackwise virtual.