How to install a gigabit Access Switch

There are many things worth learning about the Gigabit access switch. Here we mainly introduce the main steps for simple installation of the Gigabit access switch. 12 out of the 18 Gigabit access switches with 2 Gigabit ports and 6 out of 1 gigabit port. Only two vswitches With gigabit copper ports are available. The most Gigabit ports are 1000Base-SX ports. Only Flexhammer24 of harbor technology has a 1000Base-LX port.

Excellent Performance

In general, the overall performance of the Gigabit access switch is not bad. Accton ES3526L, EDIMAX ES-5224RM, harbor technology's uHammer24, TCL S4228MF and Ziguang network connected Unisnet es00002mc these five switches reach 100% wire speed in both Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s throughput and some mesh tests, the frame loss rate is 0. The five vswitches with excellent performance only have a slight difference in latency. The gigabit port delay of uHammer24 is the least, but the biggest difference with the other four models is only about 2us.

A very unique vswitch is the Flexhammer16i of harbor technology. It is configured with 16 10/100 FX Optical Fiber interfaces plus two 1000Base-SX ports. Because our tester does not have a 10/100 FX optical fiber interface card, therefore, optical signals can only be converted to electrical signals through a photoelectric converter to connect to the tester. This will have some impact on the test results, but the overall performance is good, the throughput only fails to reach the line speed when the 64-byte frame is used. Some mesh tests also show packet loss only when the 64-byte frame is used. In the throughput test, we have tested the throughput of both the 100% Mbps port and the gigabit port. The throughput of the 15 vswitches can reach wire speed, only a few vswitches cannot reach the 100% line speed at the MB port throughput. For six vswitches with only one gigabit port, we cannot measure the throughput of the gigabit port. For 12 vswitches with two Gigabit ports, the 1-gigabit port throughput of 9 vswitches, including fuse, EDIMAX ES-5224R +, EDIMAX ES-5224RM, uHammer24, FlexHammer24, Netcore 7224MST, Netcore 7224NSS, TCL S4228MF, and unisex Unisnet ES4242MC, at 64, 512, and the 1518-byte frame speed is 100%.

For Gigabit access switches, we adopt some mesh testing methods to map each gigabit port to 10 10-Gigabit ports, and other 10-Gigabit ports to achieve full mesh ing, this testing method is more rigorous than throughput testing. Shanghai Radio and Television, among the six vswitches with One gigabit port, should be sure that Infinite5024, lipleapcomm GMS5524, and LeapComm GMS5024 keep the packet loss rate to 0, accton ES3526L, EDIMAX ES-5224RM, harbor technology's uHammer24, TCL S4228MF, and Ziguang network's Unisnet es00002mc 5 switch with 2 Gigabit ports are outstanding, under such conditions, the packet loss rate is still zero. This result shows that the Gigabit access switch can maximize the load on the enterprise network. Some switches can reach 100% wire speed during throughput testing, but packet loss occurs in some mesh tests. For example, FlexHammer24 of harbor technology performs well in throughput testing, however, in some mesh tests of 512 and 1518 byte frames, the packet loss rate reaches 0.16% and 0.5%.

We have considered the 100% m port with the same module, the cross-module, and the Gigabit module for the latency test of the Gigabit access switch, which is mainly carried out at wire speed, the overall result is that the latency of the gigabit port is significantly less than that of the 10-Gigabit port. The latency between the same module and cross-module is not very large for most vswitches with MB ports. In comparison, the uHammer24 vswitch of harbor technology has the best performance in latency tests. Its gigabit port latency in 64, 512, and 1518 bytes is only 3.56us, 7.1us, and 15.16us. The results of the Back-to-Back test are basically the same as those of the throughput test. The results of the line-End Blocking and error frame Filtering test are almost the same for each switch. All Gigabit access switches in this test support these two functions.

Easy to install

All the test and test switches are very easy to use. In terms of power supply, the vswitches of gangwan network, EDIMAX, and chuangxiang company provide a power switch on the rear panel, which is a very careful consideration. Netcore and other companies also provide Reset buttons on the front panel to enable the switch to restart. The TCL S4226MF and LeapComm GMS5596 vswitches provide interfaces for DC power supply.

Most of the switches we receive provide gigabit uplink ports by installing the Gigabit extension module. The extended modules of the uHammer24, FlexHammer24, and FlexHammer16i vswitches provided by the Hong Kong Bay network test support hot swapping. Port Bay network, Accton ES3526L, Trendware TEG-S224M, Digital China D-Link DES3624i and TCL S4226MF, LeapComm GMS5596 vswitches, expansion modules have very large removal screws, manual disassembly can be completed. Shenzhou.com D-Link 3624i, Trendware TEG-S224M, Netcore 7224NSS and Netcore 7224MST vswitches have dedicated M ports, and more vswitches Support automatic line sequence recognition. Both network management and layer-3 switches support DHCP and BOOTP protocols to obtain the IP addresses required by network management. These network management switches and layer-3 switches support the TFTP or FTP protocol. Of course, many switches also support downloading software using the Xmodem protocol.

Transformers

The gigabit Branch switches provided for testing all have excellent scalability, which means super transformers are not too good. There are up to four expansion slots in the switch to be sent for test. In our opinion, the two expansion slots of the FlexHammer24 and FlexHammer16i vswitches of the WAN network provide the best scalability. The two expansion slots have the same specifications. They can be inserted into Gigabit multimode, single-mode, ultra-long-wave optical fiber modules, MB modules, and stack modules. When FlexHammer24 inserts all the M modules into two expansion slots, the switch can reach the maximum port density of 36 m copper ports in this test. Some vswitches, such as Thinker 3124A, LeapComm GMS5524, and TCL S4228MF vswitches, provide two dedicated MB extended ports that can be inserted into the optical fiber module. Both TCL S4226MF and LeapComm GMS5596 vswitches provide three expansion slots on the rear panel. One of them is specially prepared to insert the SNMP Network Management Module. This is a very careful design, for users who do not have high requirements on network management, they can pay less.

From the stack method, there are two main methods: Star and chain stack. Digital D-Link DES3624 and Trendware TEG-S224M series is a typical star stack switch, but the switch has obvious master-slave points, only the host can plug in Gigabit modules. The FlexHammer24 and FlexHammer16i vswitches of The Hong Kong Bay network are flexible. If the stacked switching matrix is inserted, the master switch can be used. The common stacking module can be inserted as the slave.

Like the uHammer 24 switch, TCL S4226MF and LeapComm GMS5596 support chain-like stacking. UHammer24 supports the stacking of up to 8 machines. The first two support a maximum of four stacks. In the stack, the Gigabit ports of different switches can be set for Link aggregation.

In the case of stacking, these switches can be connected to the primary Gigabit access switch, other machines in the stack can be configured, and all switches in the stack can be managed with one IP address. You can also use a virtual stack technology to manage up to 20 vswitches with one IP address.

Rich documentation

The product packing box for the test is complete, but we pay more attention to the switch Chinese document. Creative companies, harbor companies, Tsinghua zinguang network, Shanghai Radio and Television, shenzhoudigital D-Link, and TCL companies with Chinese instructions. Their Chinese specification is very beautifully printed. Generally, the hardware installation manual and software configuration manual are printed separately. In addition, the content is very detailed, especially the introduction of Ethernet Knowledge. The significance of these companies is not only to facilitate the majority of domestic engineers, but also to popularize network knowledge and network technology.

Smart edge

Three of the switches we tested are capable of forwarding on the third layer. They are the FlexHammer24 and FlexHammer16i of harbor Corporation and the Thinker 3124A of creative Corporation. We tested the layer-3 Performance of the FlexHammer16i switch. These layer-3 vswitches have special functions. For example, they support igmp snooping and DVMRP and PIM protocols during multicast. In addition to layer-2 Access Lists, layer-3 access lists are also supported for security. In service quality control, it also supports the scheduling mechanism of WRR and SP. Most of the switches we receive support control over broadcast storms, while the Thinker3124A switch of chuangxiang also supports control over Flooding.

Flooding occurs when the switch receives a frame and its destination MAC address is not in the Address Table of the switch, the switch then broadcasts the frame to each Ethernet port. Too many Flooding will also affect the performance of the switch and the entire network like a broadcast storm.

All the switches we receive provide P priority control. The gigabit access switches such as Ziguang and TCL combine the IEEE 802.1p priority with the IEEE 802.1Q settings to provide VLAN service quality control. In addition, some vswitches can directly set the priority of a port of the vswitch. We tried to verify this function using IXIA1600, and we made every port congested, at this time, the data stream with a higher priority is indeed not discarded. Generally, the vswitch supports two priority queues on the port, and the port of the harbor company supports four priority queues on the gigabit port.

In a test-free switch, configurable switches generally only support port-based VLAN settings. More Gigabit access switches support both the 802.1Q and port VLAN methods. The 3624i and Trendware TEG-S224M Switches of digital D-Link also support VLAN Based on the MAC address broadcast domain.

The FlexHammer24 and FlexHammer16i vswitches of harbor support 4096 VLANs. Network Management switches support GARP, GVRP, and GMRP protocols. In a large Ethernet network, not all Ethernet devices support the 802.1Q protocol, such as some switches and NICs. Most network management switches can set a port to decide whether to forward unlabeled frames and whether to mark unlabeled frames. Or remove the flag when forwarding a tagged frame to a device that does not support IEEE 802.1Q. Although the two Netcore vswitches do not support IEEE 802.1Q, they can allow IEEE 802.1Q frames to pass through the vswitch, especially in the case of ultra-long frames.

Browser in control

Another difference between the three types of switches we classify is that the configuration switch can only access the switch through the serial port to view some simple information. Both the Management Switch and layer-3 Switch support SNMP, Telnet, HTTP, and serial access to the switch.

Most Gigabit access switches use menus to configure switches. The gigabit access switch of the harbor supports the HammerOS operating system in a unified manner. This operating system provides a command line configuration interface. The command style is very similar to that of Cisco IOS. Flexible operations. The 3526L switch of Accton supports two configuration interfaces, menu and command line. Its command line interface is similar to that of IOS. Web is our most respected configuration method. One of the highlights of this test is the harbor company. The Web configuration interfaces of the three vswitches support Chinese characters, and we hope other domestic manufacturers can follow up quickly.