Spanning a port on a 4506

[oslerhoskin]

I have Catalyst 4506 at the core and have a VLAN for all my servers ( about 100 servers ). I want to create a span (monitor) session to send all the traffic from my server vlan to a gigabit port on the 4506. My questions is: a) Will this have any negative performance hit on my 4506 as there it involves a large amount of traffic, and b) would the gigabit port be able to handle all the traffic from this entire vlan?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Sayed

[glen.grant]

You have 100 servers and you want to span all that info to a single port ? More than likely you will overwhelm the span port which will give you inacurate info if you are trying to use this for a monitoring purpose.

[satya.singh]

a) This will have negative impact if the server network transaction is a lot, the swith would have to copy of the packets received or transmitted by the source interfaces and sent to the destination interface.

b) The gig port would only be able to handle traffic incase the total volume (spanned) is less than 80% of the port capacity.

In Addition, the destination device would not be able to handle such huge volume and would rather not provide any meaningful information.