Showing posts with label 6224. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 6224. Show all posts

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Creating a LAG between Dell PowerConnect 6224 and Cisco 2960S

Creating a LAG between two switch for redundancy and bandwidth is normally not very complicated. I need to create a LAG between a stack of Dell PowerConnect 6224s and a single Cisco 2960-S. I had already created a LAG between the 6224 stack and a 3750-X stack with out any trouble. 

I setup the LAG on the 6224 stack with:

interface range ethernet 1/g24,2/g24
channel-group 24 mode auto

And on the Cisco 2960-S:

Interface range gi1/0/47,gi1/0/48
channel-group 1 mode active

The LAG would be active for a few moment then one of the 2960-S ports would turn orange, with interface status 'err-disabled'
I thought maybe spanning tree was blocking the ports, but this was not the case:

show spanning-tree blocked-ports

Further troubleshooting, I set both of the channel groups to static LAG thinking it might not be negotiating LACP correctly:

 Dell 6224 stack:

interface range ethernet 1/g24,2/g24
channel-group 24 mode on

Cisco 2960-S:

Interface range gi1/0/47,gi1/0/48
channel-group 1 mode on

The LAG was still taking a dive :(

Troubleshooting, etherchannel debugging was enabled on the Cisco
Cisco 2960-S:

debug etherchannel 
Interface range gi1/0/47,gi1/0/48
shutdown
no shutdown

With debugging enabled we could see that the 2960-S was erroring the ports because PAgP could not be negotiated!! We didn't ask for PAgP in the first place. PAgP is Cisco proprietary and not supported on other vendors switches.

The solution was to set the channel group on the Cisco to 'passive' mode :)

Dell 6224 stack:

interface range ethernet 1/g24,2/g24
channel-group 24 mode auto

Cisco 2960-S:

Interface range gi1/0/47,gi1/0/48
channel-group 1 mode passive

You can check to see if the LAG is passing VLAN trunk with this command on the Cisco 2960-S:

show interface trunk

Inter-vendor switch connectivity issues eh!! This seems to only be the case with 2960's as the 3750's where fine. Thanks to Paul Walton for his troubleshooting.

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Comparing the Dell, Force 10 and other vendors switches for iSCSI


Comparing the Dell PowerConnect 54xx, 55xx, 62xx and 70xx switches for iSCSI

Mpps  = Million Packets Per Second

5424 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 48.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 35.6 Mpps
Up to 8,000 MAC Addresses
64MB of CPU DRAM
16MB of Flash Memory
2Mb Packet Buffer Memory

5524 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 128.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 65.47 Mpps
Up to 16,000 MAC Addresses
1GB of CPU DRAM
16MB of Flash Memory
12Mb Packet Buffer Memory

6224 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 136 Gb/s
Forwarding Rate 95 Mpps
Up to 8,000 MAC Addresses
256MB of CPU SDRAM
32MB of Flash Memory
?? Packet Buffer Memory

6348 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 184 Gb/s
Forwarding Rate 160 Mpps
Up to 8,000 MAC Addresses
512MB of CPU SDRAM
64MB of Flash Memory
?? Packet Buffer Memory

7024 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 176.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 125 Mpps
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
1GB of CPU DRAM
64MB of Flash Memory
32Mb Packet Buffer Memory

7048 Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 176.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 160 Mpps
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
1GB of CPU DRAM
64MB of Flash Memory
32Mb Packet Buffer Memory

7048R Performance
Switch Fabric Capacity 224.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 160 Mpps
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
1GB of CPU DRAM
64MB of Flash Memory
32Mb Packet Buffer Memory

Force 10 s4810
Switch Fabric Capacity 1.28 Tbps
Forwarding Rate 960 Mpps
Up to 128,000 MAC Addresses
2GB of CPU DRAM
9Mb Packet Buffer Memory

Force 10 MXL
Switch Fabric Capacity 1.28 Tbps
Forwarding Rate 960 Mpps
Up to 128,000 MAC Addresses
2GB of CPU DRAM
9Mb Packet Buffer Memory

Force 10 s60
Switch Fabric Capacity 176 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 132 Mpps
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
?GB of CPU DRAM
1.25Gb Packet Buffer Memory


Cisco 3750G
Switch Fabric Capacity 32.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 38.7 Mpps
Up to 12,000 MAC Addresses
? of CPU DRAM
128MB of Flash Memory
8Mb Packet Buffer Memory*

Cisco Nexus 5548p
Switch Fabric Capacity 160.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 714.24 Mpps (Layer 2)
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
32Mb Packet Buffer Memory*

Cisco 3750X-24S
Switch Fabric Capacity 160.0 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 65.5 Mpps
Up to 12,000 MAC Addresses
? of CPU DRAM
128MB of Flash Memory
?Mb Packet Buffer Memory*

Brocade FCX648S
Switch Fabric Capacity 200 Gbps
Forwarding Rate 150 Mpps
Up to 32,000 MAC Addresses
?GB of CPU DRAM
?Mb Packet Buffer Memory


Basically the faster frame forwarding rate and the higher the port buffer the better, which is how you gauge a good switch.


*0.75MB of ingress buffering is dynamically divided into port
buffers/queues, 2 of which are user-configurable. There's 2MB of
egress buffering that provides 4 egress queues per physical port.