Which Switch? 6500--4500--3750

The company I work for is currently planning to upgrade existing switches - Catalyst 5000 & 5500 - to more modern technology. The plan is to replace all with 6500 chassis units-but these seem to be very high priced and are they suited to plug in end user computers? My understanding is that the

6500 would be used as a core switch - maybe with high speed fiber modules to other switches.

The alternatives are the 4500 range & 3750 stackable. I'd be interested in anyone's implementations using the 3 switch types and recommendations of suitability. We plan to use VOIP sometime soon so this is also a consideration.

Reply to
David Wood
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if you can afford it, the 6500 switches are a great choice for the expandability, the port density available, the many types of modules and tecnologies supported. In my workplace, our 65xx are acting as all

3 - core, access, and edge. We have MSFC's - key for speed troughout. We also have VoIP - we have modules supporting T1's coming in, we are using a firewall module to separate voice from data traffic (this was a litle buggy at first), and on our 6513's, wich are jampacked, we have phones on over half the ports. Traffic on the switch never goes above 20percent. If you have the money, this is a great solution. At other sites where we are not using VoIP we are using 3550's ... The price was better although. Wehad to get multiple for more ports.

Hth

Reply to
karateD

All of the above are great solutions - you just need to do some network capacity planning.

Macroscape Solutions, Inc

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Reply to
macroscape

Haven't used 4500's so I can't comment. But 3750 stackable were lacking key SNMP monitoring capabilities so we punted on those. If PoE is a consideration, make sure you do the power calculation. You'll have to decide between Cisco power and af compliant power ratings. So plan your power supplies accordingly.

Reply to
Hansang Bae

Typically 6500 would be overkill for anything but core switches in most networks.

Many networks would be just fine using the 4500 with SUP V engine as core switches

For access switches looks at the security features you need to protect your network.

Also think long and hard about have layer 3 access switches instead of layer 2...

I would certainly consider the 3750 stackables as layer 3 accesss switches

Reply to
Merv

Hansang -

Could you elaborate on what you meant by the 3750's not supporting key SNMP features? We just finished our core upgrade design, and one of the final designs called for 3750's in the server farm and closet aggregation modules. We went with a 6500-based solution, but I'm interested in hearing what limitations you've seen.

Good SNMP support is important for us too...we don't run any commercial network management apps. We use NMIS, Cacti, Nedi, Cisco SDM and Network Assistant, and other opensource tools. BTW, thanks for the comments on the cert forum a couple of weeks back. :-)

Reply to
slim

As far as I know the 3750 has the same problem as the 3550 - if you have vlan-based IP interfaces (SVIs) you can't get SNMP statistics for these. I don't know if this is what Hansang Bae was referring to.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, snipped-for-privacy@nethelp.no

Reply to
Steinar Haug

David,

Sorry, I should of mentioned the fact that all of the cabling from my office comes into one main computer room. There are no hall wiring closets! Obviously this influenced our decision to go with a few big chasses versus a number of smaller switches. It is easier for our cable mgmt. - As for wiring closets in a hallway, 65xx's seem like overkill. Good luck ...

Reply to
karateD

Hi,

The answer; it depends :)

In your case I would go for the 4500's with SupII+ or SupV supervisors. If you're going to use them as access switches you'll probably not need the brute performance of the 6500's, certainly not if you're going to implement VoIP with 100Mbps ethernet ports on the phones. As for the 6500's options to add special blades like firewalls and stuff, it depends if you need these options. The 3750's are a little more expensive if you need more ports w/ PoE than buying PoE line cards for the 4500's. Besides this, the 3750's offer good performance and features comparable to the 4500's. The 3750 does offer more redundancy if used in a stack than the 450(3/6)'s do because of the redundant switch engine you get when combining 3750's in a stack. The same level of redundancy can be accomplished using 4507's with two supervisors. Maybe a combination of 3750's and 4500's ? Do you have multiple patch locations? Do they all require the as many ports? Smaller locations could be equiped with 3750's more cost-effectively.

Erik

Reply to
Erik Tamminga

Regarding patch locations they are located one per floor in a tower block with the core at ground level and WAN connection Another building has only 2 closets for 5 floors and some of the lengths are over 90meters!

This might be of interest-comparison document of the relative backplane speed

5000 Modular Shared bus 1.2 Gbps 5500 Modular Crossbar 3.6 Gbps 6000 Modular Shared bus 32 Gbps 6500 with SFM Modular Crossbar 256 Gbps 6500 with Supervisor 720 Modular Crossbar 360 Gbps (720 full duplex) 4500 Modular Centralized 64 Gbps 3750 Fixed-Stackable Dual Ring 32 Gbps

Reply to
David Wood

Hi David,

Backplane speed is always a discussion; but in my opinion; how ofter are you getting anywhere near the backplane-speed offered by mothern switches. For example; if you take the 4500's with their 64Gbps backplane speed; that would take 64 hosts connected to a single switch at full blast to get there. Or when using only 100Mbps desktop connections 640 hosts. Given the fact you have multiple patch locations, I would consider two

4500's (SupV) at the core and stacks of a couple 3750's at each floor. Dual-interconnect the floors to the core with fiber patches. As soon as you're hitting 3750 stacks of 3 or more units it might be worth investigating 4500's (Sup II+) (looking at price per port).

Erik

Reply to
Erik Tamminga

See edits in list at top

With respect to the 4500 the limitations are not entirely academic.

C4500#sh int cou det | beg Rx-No-Pkt-Buff Port Rx-No-Pkt-Buff Gi1/1 0 Gi1/2 0 Gi3/1 0 Gi3/2 688 Gi3/3 144558 Gi3/4 0 Gi3/5 249 Gi3/6 10 Gi3/7 0 Gi3/8 0 Gi3/9 0 Gi3/10 22 Gi3/11 0 Gi3/12 0 Gi3/13 19811 Gi3/14 112546

Reply to
anybody43

[snip]

When you power down the master, the management IP stops responding for a few seconds, but SNMP agent will report it's down for about 30 seconds. This can cause false triggers depending on one's threshold

After removing a stack member, you can still configure it via the master as if it were still there. SNMP host reports the removed switch ports with status of "admin up" (hardware present) & "operation down" (not connected). If SNMP is configured to keep polling the ports of the removed stack member, it'll continue to get generate false alarms (unless you go in and run the "shutdown" commands on the removed interfaces).

Also, you get conflicting information via IFTable MIB and STACK MIBs. so this too can generate false information.

Anytime!

Reply to
Hansang Bae

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