Looking for switch recommendations ...

[Wes Peters]

On Sunday 28 March 2004 11:37 pm, Steven Stremciuc wrote:
> Has anyone tested port mirroring on these switches (2524) and run into
> any problems? Many people seem to recommend these ProCurve switches here
> and so far they seem like a great buy (only one I saw that cheap that
> does 802.1x). I'm also looking for a managed switch (probably something
> off ebay) and would like to find something that does port mirroring
> nicely as I'd like to play with that in the future. I saw Dell's
> Powerconnect 3348 has some problems with port mirroring and am trying to
> avoid getting a switch where the feature is listed as supported but
> doesn't work as expected.
>
> Info about the 3348's problems:
> http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pc_managed
>&message.id=1425

Every switch that does port mirroring probably has some problems related to 
port mirroring, because mirroring typically cannot be done in hardware.  If 
nothing else, you can expect some degraded performance on the port(s) being 
mirrored and on the port doing the mirroring, because the packets have to 
be fondled by the CPU before they can be switched.  Even with a really fast 
processor, this will increase the latency a bit.

In a multi-slot switch like the ProCurve 4000M, you probably want to mirror 
to a port on the same switch blade.  This certainly helped with the latency 
in the Xylan chassis.  Smaller switches like the 2500 series are *probably* 
implemented as a slot-based architecture with all of the slots on one 
board, so it may be advantageous to have the mirror ports in the same group 
of 8.  Without knowing the architecture more closely, it would be hard to 
say for sure.

The guy who posted the message in the Dell forum you linked above sounds 
like he has no idea what he's doing.  It's not possible to use a switch 
port mirroring function to monitor a switch without a strong knowlege of 
network configuration.  The fact that he's getting only packets bearing the 
IP address of the other NIC in his XP box doesn't lend me to believe he has 
that knowlege.

-- 
         "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                              wes at softweyr.com