The biomedical engineering lab wants to manage two physical AOS-CX switches as a single logical device with one management IP and one configuration file, primarily to simplify day-to-day administration rather than to maximize inter-building resiliency. Which technology best fits this goal?

VSF, Virtual Switching Framework, stacks multiple physical AOS-CX switches into a single logical switch with a shared configuration and a single management IP, which is exactly the simplified single-point-of-administration outcome described, making it the better fit than a technology that deliberately keeps switches separate. VSX is the wrong tool here because it intentionally preserves two independent control planes and two management IPs specifically to avoid a single software fault taking down both switches — that independence is a feature for resiliency, but it works against the stated goal of one unified device to manage. A manually configured LAG only bundles data-plane links between two switches' uplinks; it does nothing to unify their management interfaces or configuration files, so an administrator would still log into and configure each switch separately. Two separate switches relying on spanning tree to prevent loops addresses a completely different problem — loop prevention — and does not create any unified management experience at all, leaving twice the administrative overhead. Caveat: VSF's single control plane means a software issue affecting the stack can affect both physical members together, which is the tradeoff for that administrative simplicity. Operational check: after stacking, confirm both members display in a single 'show system' or stack-status output rather than as two separate switches.