SG300 VS. SG500 Comparison Chart

[mike0000111111]

Hello Cisco Community:

I'm preparing our small company for a complete network upgrade. We're purchasing a Cisco Wireless Controller, 2 Switches, 2 Routers, and several Aironet AP's.  I'd greatly appreciate if you could answer the following questions for me:

1. I need to pick a switch.  How do I determine if I want to use an SG300 vs. SG500 SB switch?  What is/are the major difference(s) between these two product lines?  To do proper QoS, will I need to get a Catalyst?  My QoS design is below.

2. I intend to have multiple VLAN's including voice, data, enterprise wireless, native, management, and guest.  I also want to use QoS, 4 layer model with Call Admission Control and DiffServ with Strict priority queuing and CBWFQ.  Primarily, I'm trying to follow the QoS design recommendations from the Cisco Published "End to End QoS Network Design".  

3. I'm looking for a layer 3 switch, PoE, 24 ports, stackable, and with some ability to fine tune QoS.

I've ALREADY looked at the data sheets for the SG300, SG500, and the Catalyst.  I know the Catalyst uses IOS.  Other than that, I'm having a really hard time distinguishing between their major product categories.

Thanks for your assistance,

Mike

[adawa]

Hello, mike. 

Sounds like the SG300 or SG500 can meet your requirements as far as stacking (only for 500 series), PoE, VLAN, Layer 3 and QoS. However, the going with Cisco Catalyst (like the 2960-X series) switches can provide you better feature set compared to Cisco SB switches, such as higher stack throughput (FlexStack Plus), cross stack QoS and intelligent PoE/+. Are you already working with your Cisco rep or partner for this requirement?

Let me know if you have additional concerns or e-mail (adawa@cisco.com) me directly. Kind regards. 

[mike0000111111]

Hi Adawa:

Thank you for your advice.  Can you tell me if the Catalyst 2960S has static inter vlan routing for both Ipv6 and Ipv4?

All directions to turn on routing requires changing the SDM Template to LanBase Routing.  But in order to use IPv6 features, I'd have to turn on the dual IPv4 and IPv6 template, which evidently isn't supported in the 2960-S

The following document states that the Catalyst 2960S can only turn on Lanbase-Routing and Default Template.

 http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2960/software/release/12-2_55_se/configuration/guide/scg_2960/swsdm.html

Even if I go with just the 2960, how do I enable both SDM lanbase and dual stack templates?  Which versions of the 2960 will do Intervlan routing with IPv4 and IPv6?  How do I verify?

Thanks,

Mike

[adawa]

Let me look into that, Mike. Feel free to e-mail (adawa@cisco.com) if you have any other follow up concerns. 

[mike0000111111]

Hi Adawa:

I ended up purchasing 3560 switches.  I no longer need to know this answer.  However, for posterity's sake I think I learned that both can IPv4 and IPv6 can be routed on the 2960 beginning with OS version 12.2.  But I'm only 80% certain.  This book speaks a little about 2960 static routing: Switched Networks Companion Guide by Cisco Publications, and of course there's the 2960 Configuration Manual for IOS 12.2 (Google search).  

Thanks,

Mike

[bcoverstone]

I wanted to follow up with this because I have three of the four models, SG300, C2960G, C3560X, with an SG500 on the way.

The C3560X is by far the most powerful, and with the ipbase license can even do OSPF routing.

The C2960G is the next most powerful.  You can do both IPv4 and IPv6 routing (vlan/static), once you change the SDM prefer type.  The 2960 is a solid choice for simple routing.

The SG300 is just like the C2960G, except it does not have the ability route IPv6, and you can only enable three interfaces with IPv6.  Quite limited and makes it almost worthless as a layer 3 router.

The SG500, from what I read, can perform IPv6 routing.  Therefore, that makes the SG500 and C2960G on par with each other.  I'm not sure which one is better yet.

[mike0000111111]

Thanks for the update!  It's been about a year since I asked the question.  I think I remember the SG500 not running iOS and that was a major downside to certain persons on the forum.  How do you feel about it?

And does your C2960G permit you to do ipv4/ipv6 routing simultaneously?  I realize it's static routing (this is fine for me), but are there other limitations?

Thanks!

-Mike

[bcoverstone]

The SG300/500 does have a command prompt.  While it's not as full features as the full IOS, it is similar, and does suffice.  The biggest drawback is the DEBUG commands are missing, so you better know what you're doing :)  I'm currently using the SG300 for 802.1X authentication with dynamic VLAN assignment, DHCP snooping, RA Guard, DHCPv6 Guard.  It also has ARP inspection and IPv6 source guard to make sure people are not spoofing IP addresses that they haven't received.

The C2960G can do simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 routing after you run "sdm prefer lanbase-routing".  Just keep one thing in mind, you don't route by individual ports by running "no switchport" like you can on a 3560.  You route via the vlan interfaces.  Which, when it gets down to nuts and bolts, is the exact same thing as assigning one VLAN to one port and routing on the VLAN interface, then making sure that VLAN doesn't propagate anywhere (i.e. via VTP).

Here is the output showing the resources:

WS-C2960G-48TC-L#show sdm prefer
 The current template is "lanbase-routing" template.
 The selected template optimizes the resources in
 the switch to support this level of features for
 0 routed interfaces and 255 VLANs.

  number of unicast mac addresses:                  4K
  number of IPv4 IGMP groups + multicast routes:    0.25K
  number of IPv4 unicast routes:                    4.25K
    number of directly-connected IPv4 hosts:        4K
    number of indirect IPv4 routes:                 256
  number of IPv6 multicast groups:                  0.375k
  number of IPv6 unicast routes:                    1.25K
    number of directly-connected IPv6 addresses:    0.75K
    number of indirect IPv6 unicast routes:         448
  number of IPv4 policy based routing aces:         0
  number of IPv4/MAC qos aces:                      0.125k
  number of IPv4/MAC security aces:                 0.375k
  number of IPv6 policy based routing aces:         0
  number of IPv6 qos aces:                          0.375k
  number of IPv6 security aces:                     127