Wow! What a great bunch of responses, especially those from Greg, Ryan and Aaron. Most of it was over my head...but I'm hoping to absorb just enough to make an intelligent decision for our test lab.
I've tried to identify which specs of a switch are actually important for our use-case. To recap, we're are moving towards having (at most) 20 computers in our test lab with GigE NICs (some with multiples). When we care about the performance, the scenario will be that most of those computers will be hammering one or more web servers, also on the same switch, with as much traffic as it/they can handle. In some cases, each "load engine" will be aliasing multiple IP addresses on each NIC. All of the machines will be on the same subnet. When we run tests, we would like the network to be invisible...meaning that it is never the bottleneck. So I've seen a few specs mentioned in switch literature and mentioned in the discussions -- I am trying to assess how those relate to our situation. 1. MTU - larger is better to improve bandwidth efficiency 2. # of MAC addresses - since we have a small number of computers on a small network, I would guess this is unimportant to us. 3. Switching Capacity - pretty important to us, I would think, but also seems to be the same for all models within a given line from a given manufacturer - is the published number meaningful? 4. Forwarding Rate - I have no idea what this is...important? One other point that I wanted to verify is that one of the jobs of the switch is to keep traffic away from parts of the network that are not involved with the sender or receiver. For example - the switch in our test lab is hooked to the switch for the rest of the office, to which the rest of our desktops are connected. So when we are running tests in the lab, none of that traffic bleeds into the rest of the network affecting performance there. My understanding (and anecdotal evidence) is that this is true...is it? TIA, C I wrote:
We would like to upgrade our testlab to a gigabit switch.
<snip> -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Chris Merrill | Web Performance, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://webperformance.com 919-433-1762 | 919-845-7601 Website Load Testing and Stress Testing Software & Services ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
