The Boss asked me how much traffic was flowing through our core...

[RomeoEcho]

I have a couple of WS-4500X-32 switches at the core of my data center.  They are each capable of switching 800Gbps and forwarding 250Mpps, according to the data sheet.

How do I determine the actual load on my switch relative to those numbers?  Obviously, the result will have to be either a snapshot in time or averaged or a period of time.

I understand that the nature of switching is to distribute the processing across the ASIC's.  And that the CPU only processes specific parts of the work.  Making it impossible to use processing to determine back plane performance.

Or do I literally have to resort to adding up the RXBS and TXBS columns and the RXPS and TXPS columns on a "sh int summ" command?  Would those totals be comparable to the published switching and routing maximums?

Romeo

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Yea, that's what you would need to do, more or less.

Understand, though, that PPS requirements change with packet sizes and that hardware often has different PPS rates for different packets sizes. I.e. the same bandwidth requires different PPS for different packet sizes, but the hardware may be (and often is) unable to provide the same bandwidth for different packet sizes.

The 250 Mpps rating is likely for minimum size Ethernet packets which would equate to about 168 Gbps.