I have a 4507 and a 3560G connected over Multimode fiber using 1000-SX and I want to test the communications between the switches by loading it with as much traffic as possible and then checking the counters. What's the best way to do this? Should I just put a PC on each end and copy files and then check the counters? Are there cisco IOS commands to do this? What are normal statistics? What's bad? What should I be looking for?
Thank You Ned Hart
No, that will often produce inaccurate answers.
I suggest that you set up something like MRTG to monitor the traffic counts, the CPU usage, and the error counts, and that then you use a program such as netperf (between high performance computers at each end of the link) to test the link under a variety of conditions.
NB: when you set up MRTG or equivilent, use SNMPv2 and read out the 64 bit counters; those have names such as ifHCInOctets where the 32 bit counter equivilent would be ifInOctets
For an initial quick test, you can use a long running ping of 100K packets and varying packet size up to maximum MTU.
Confirm no loss of ping packets and check the interface counters and make sure there are no input or output errors.
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