Ronald Jansen

Overview of layer 3 switches

This is a layer 3 switch overview; Layer 3 switches are used to route traffic between hosts at wire speed. Normal (affordable) routers are not capable of routing large amounts of data. When you enter the Layer 3 switching market, you will find a lot of products that make you dizzy. In my little search these are the vendors of layer 3 and layer 2+ switches:

  1. Cisco
  2. HP
  3. Huawei
  4. Juniper
  5. Brocade
  6. Extreme networks
  7. Dell
  8. Alcatel
  9. NetGear
  10. D-link

Types of layer 3 switches

Layer 3 switches are available as a modular chassis, standalone (fixed port) unit or as a stack device. For smaller organizations there are layer 3 switches that can be stacked. Normally this scales to approximately 400 users.

Layer 2+ (Light Layer 3 or LL3) is seen by some HP switches. This is used for inter VLAN routing (if you enable routing, it routes everything between the VLAN’s and you can make some static routes, it is not dynamic routing). Full layer 3 is dynamic routing based on metrics like cost, load and access control.

What is the difference between layer 3 switch and a router (besides speed)?

Layter 3 switches don’t support Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Internal networks use protocols like RIP and OSPF where Routers use BGP. The functional difference is found in the stability and robustness of the BGP protocol.

Looking for detailed information on vendor websites

PS: Have you ever been navigating through HP websites? My experience with this set of websites would trigger the question: If navigating these websites represents HP routing and switching, then I’m moving to another vendor. I hope is like a Chinese restaurant: Presentation s…cks, but food is perfect.

Scaling up networks from 300 users to 1,000+ users with a layer 3 switch

Summary: Layer 3 switches (sometimes it is a stripped down version called layer 2+) are needed to scale up smaller networks to larger networks. These larger networks are normally switched networks with multiple VLAN’s. If you need Layer3 switches, you enter the higher end of the switchs market. See our overview of layer 3 switches.

The history of Ethernet switches

We all know that an Ethernet switch was the next step of scaling up networks from a traditional hub. A switch made it possible to create one broadcast domain without the limitations of data collisions. Many users connected to one collolion domain will limit the datatraffic. An will create multiple collision domains and one bradcast domain.

The Ethernet switch has evolved from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, 1Gbps until 10Gbps. Bandwidth has increased substantially.

The next step for scaling up networks is to segment one broadcast (physical) network into multiple broadcast domains using VLAN’s. VLAN’s are also used to segment different kinds of traffic. One of the major purposes currently being used is to segment VoIP traffic into a separate VLAN.

The next step: Layer 3 switching

If you need to route traffic between VLAN’s you need a router that is part of those VLAN’s. Normally routers are not really equipped for large quantities of data. A layer 3 switch has specific hardware to process traffic.

SolarWinds ipMonitor review

History of ipMonitor

ipMonitor dashboardFor a good SolarWinds ipMonitor review, some history about the product helps to understand the product and its future. In 2004 ipMonitor was a spun-off from DeepMetrix as a stand alone product. In April 2007 ipMonitor was acquired by SolarWinds and ipMonitor fills in the gab for the Orion NPM platform. SolarWinds NPM didn't have WMI, services and application monitoring capabilities in the past. SolarWinds is using the knowledge from ipMonitor to build the Application and Service Monitoring module for the Orion platform. ipMonitor is sold by SolarWinds as an entry level monitoring tool.

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Application Performance Monitoring

Just to kick off this topic: Application Performance Monitoring. If you are running some kind of monitoring system, there will be a moment in time that the performance of certain applications will be an issue. The first thing people start to say: It’s the network! The network is slow!

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Network and System Management explained

In my honest opinion, there is a lot of confusion in the market. This is exploited by vendors to sell you something: it is not suited for you or doesnt have the right fit for you. This needs a little bit of explanation. If you want to manage your infrastructure, Network and System Management is the mother of all: You manage you infrastructure and this can be done only by monitoring. There is a lot of confusion between the different terms being used in this market.

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Price of Network Management Tools is important

Most companies that do not have any network monitoring tools in place will start with OpenSource. These tools are normally what they call point tools: they focus on a certain area for network monitoring. Well known free tools are Cacti, MRTG and Nagios. Also other OpenSource network monitoring tools can be found. 

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