Determining Core Switch User Capability/Processing Power

[John Robinson IV]

I am curious whether or not there is a means to tell how much traffic a core switch can handle to decide the best product to use. For example if this switch is doing intervlan routing, has 100 vlans and 1000 users, vs. a switch that has 200 vlans and 5000 users. We are trying to decide the best switch to purchase depending on the circumstances. (How much processing or users it can handle. What's the best way to ascertain this information? Thank you.

[balaji.bandi · Accepted solution]

To make it right solution, this required lot of input what kind of services to offer for users.

best suggestion contact local SE or Partner who can help you visiting the site, taking requirement and make design based on the requirement and provide BoM.

Right now cisco suggesting Cat 9600 as core module, Cat 9500 also act as Core Switch.

[John Robinson IV]

Cisco is always going to recommend the most expensive thing they have to offer as well :).

For practical use, I'd like to find out just what will put a load on my processor, and just how much it can handle. Perhaps talking to a cisco professional may be the answer.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Normally, unless you're a public data center providing customers VLANs, VLAN count isn't a consideration.

User count, except for total MAC number of entries, isn't often much of a consideration either.

What you "size" a network device for is to handle a certain amount of traffic (which can vary much by kind of hosts and applications, i.e. number VLANs and/or number users, alone, tells you very little for capacity needs),

[John Robinson IV]

Oh of course. I only mentioned that is a quantifier as opposed to "Traffic, A, B, and C" for an idea. The number of users doing multiple things at the same time could correlate with processing load, is my thinking.

[Mark Malone]

Cisco is always going to recommend the most expensive thing they have to offer as well :).

actually the newer gear from Cisco does be cheaper , so if you bought a 4500 now it would be more expensive than a new model 9k , when they push the new product they have better deals and discounts ,we just went through this with them on a massive ILCM globally and we were about 15% cheaper with the newer products and then also get the longer life span on newer kit and faster hardware

also good tool
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/switch-selector.html

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Actually on most Cisco switches, processor load doesn't depend too much on volume and/or kind of transit traffic because the switches usually have dedicated hardware for "normal" traffic forwarding. Traffic "to" the switch itself, or "unusual" traffic can load up the switch's CPU, sometimes quite quickly too.