Catalyst 6500 Performance Issues

[wfh]

I upgraded from Cat 3550 to 6500. The 6500 acts as my access, distribution, and core. When we upgrade we had alot of issues with poor performance. Almost all of them were related to speed and duplexing issues. By hardcoding the ports on both sides the issues seemed to go away. My first question is this normal to have some many problems with autonegotiation on these switches? ( I didn't have any of these problems on the 3550 ) Second we had to move some server with Fast Ethernet NIC cards from 67xx blade to the 61xx blade to increase performance. Is this a known issue? Lastly, I have about 400 nodes separated over 2 VLANS (data and voice) Should I be segmenting more?

Thanks,

Wayne

[m.singer]

When you use the autonegotiate option on a 100BaseTX port, it automatically configures for full-duplex operation if the connected device also supports full duplex. If the attached device does not autonegotiate, the port automatically configures itself to half duplex.

I can suggest you to modify your switch in 3 ways as follows.

1. Check your multicast configuration and do pruning to avoid unwanted traffic communication.

2. Configure QOS in the switch, so that you can able to prioritize the traffic. It give more speed and reliable communication.

3. If possible upgrade your 10MB connection to 100MB for more speed.

Apart from this,

1. Ensure the distance (100M) between the switches or with clients machine.

2. Check the speed and duplex settings.

3. Check the interfaces using " Show interface 

For more information:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/53.shtml

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/46.html

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/3.html