cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
1074
Views
0
Helpful
3
Replies

Why do they say switches are wire speed / wire rate when they arent

carl_townshend
Spotlight
Spotlight

Hi

As per my other thread on here, we are having issues with a 3750X not being able to give us the throughput required for our iscsi / vm traffic.

The ports are never maxed out yet we seem to get drops on them, I believe this is due to small buffer sizes.

If that's the case then why can't the switch give us the 1gig throughput on each port as advertised ?

3 Replies 3

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

Disclaimer

The Author of this posting offers the information contained within this posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose. Information provided is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as rendering professional advice of any kind. Usage of this posting's information is solely at reader's own risk.

Liability Disclaimer

In no event shall Author be liable for any damages wha2tsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of use, data or profit) arising out of the use or inability to use the posting's information even if Author has been advised of the possibility of such damage.

Posting

The 3750X can easily provide 1 gig throughput on a gig port.  The likely issue is, you're sending bursts of more than 1 gig to a gig port, and there's insufficient buffing to handle those bursts, so you see drops.

To decrease the drops, you'll need to better control bursting and/or improve buffer management.

For example, if your hosts using the iSCSI device are on gig ports, you might try running them at 100 Mbps.  (Unfortunately, this alone, besides "slowing" them, may result in egress drops on their ports.)

If your iSCSI devices is not already on a "uplink" port, move it to one.  (On the 3750s, each bank of 24 copper ports has 2 MB of buffers, as also do the switch's "uplink" ports.)

On a 3750, I've found you can often much, much reduced egress drops (NB: actually for iSCSI port, too) by enabling QoS, and configuring buffers to be in the common pool and use it dynamically (rather than reserving buffers to interfaces).

How did you tune the buffers ? pls give an example

I think we are looking at replacing them with Nexus 5k or a 4948M as these are true datacentre switches, a 3750X is campus

I have some prior posts that show "how" you might.  If you cannot find them, let me know.

Review Cisco Networking for a $25 gift card