Chris McEniry <[email protected]> writes:

> Anyone have a recommendation - manufacturer and class - for a small
> datacenter (couple dozen servers, 100Mb of internet traffic) switch
> infrastructure?
> 
> I'm biased for Cisco because of history, but I'm now looking at a
> startup's budget.  We have a bsd firewall in front of everything, and
> the switch infrastructure is just doing layer 2.  We currently have some
> Procurves in place, but they're showing drops (DiscardIn mostly -
> usually < 1% but spiked up to 10% at one point) even though they're not
> even coming close to the rated specs for traffic.  And it's just drops -
> I got gooseeggs for other error counters.  Am I naive to think that the
> they should be showing clean (systems are showing clean)? or am I just
> using the wrong tool for the job?

I had a similar problem with my own procurves not too long ago.
After pulling out a bunch of hair and cursing my large layer 2 (I have 
3 racks on one flat vlan)  I figured out the problem was that I'm a moron,
and I had assigned two virtual machines the same MAC address.

(we discovered this because the problem got worse when one of the systems
in question started getting a lot of traffic, and it brought the network
to it's knees...  but we had symptoms as you describe, the mysterious 
<1% drops at the switch, for several months before, and after we sorted 
out the dupe MAC problem, that problem went away.)  


I don't know if that's your problem or not, but especially now that
everyone and his brother is using virtualization, mac address conflicts
are quite a bit more common than they used to be.  


-- 
Luke S. Crawford
http://prgmr.com/xen/         -   Hosting for the technically adept
http://nostarch.com/xen.htm   -   We don't assume you are stupid.  
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