With the gradual deepening of network applications, carrier-grade switches, especially Layer 3 switches, have become the focus of today's market competition. But in switch equipment with different functions and a wide range, how do users clear the fog and find products that meet their own application characteristics. Next, Hangzhou Feichang Technology will tell you how to identify the pros and cons of switch performance, let's take a look!
Function is the most direct indicator.
For general access layer switches, simple QoS guarantee, security mechanism, support network management strategy, spanning tree protocol and VLAN are all indispensable functions, but if you analyze it carefully, you can still use a simple appearance. Some functions are further subdivided, and these subdivided functions are the main reason for product differences and an important way to reflect the added value of products. Application-level QoS guarantee In order to provide users with greater flexibility in practical applications, the QoS policy of the switch must support multi-level packet priority setting, which can be set separately for MAC address, VLAN, IP address, and port. . At the same time, the switch must have good congestion control and flow restriction capabilities, support Diffserv differentiated services, and be able to intelligently distinguish different application streams according to the source/destination MAC/IP to meet the needs of real-time multimedia applications. Although some switches on the market currently claim to have QoS guarantees, they only support single-level priority settings, which brings a lot of inconvenience to users' practical applications.
VLAN supports
VLAN or virtual local area network. By dividing the local area network into virtual network VLAN network segments, network management and network security can be strengthened, and unnecessary data broadcasting can be controlled. The work group in the network can break through the geographical location restrictions in the shared network, and according to management Function to divide subnets. Switches of different manufacturers have different support capabilities for VLANs, and the number of VLANs supported is also different. Network management function
Through the network management function, management software can be used to manage and configure the switch, for example, it can be managed through a Web browser, Telnet, SNMP, RMON, etc. Usually, switch manufacturers provide management software or third-party management software to remotely manage the switch. General switches meet SNMPMIBI/MIBII statistical management functions, and support configuration management, quality of service management, alarm management and other strategies, while more complex Gigabit switches will support RMON active monitoring by adding a built-in RMON group (mini-RMON) .
Link aggregation
Link aggregation can make the link bandwidth between switches and between switches and servers have very good scalability. For example, two, three, and four gigabit links can be bound together to make The bandwidth of the link has doubled. Set up redundant links in a network, and use Spanning Tree Protocol to block the backup link, which logically does not form a loop, and once a failure occurs, the backup link is enabled.
Support VRRP protocol
VRRP (Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol) is a solution to ensure network reliability. In this protocol, the default gateway (DefaultGateway) of the terminal IP device on the shared multi-access access medium is redundantly backed up, so that when one of the three-layer switch devices goes down, the backed-up device will take over the forwarding work in time, The user provides transparent handover, which improves the quality of network service. The VRRP protocol is similar to Cisco's HSRP protocol, but HSRP is proprietary to Cisco. At present, mainstream switch manufacturers have already supported the VRRP protocol in their products, but it will take time to be widely used.