How to manage L2 and L3 switches

With the most comprehensive feature set, Managed Switches provide the best application experience, highest level of security, and the most accurate network control/management capabilities. It also offers the highest scalability within the category of fixed configuration switches. So, managed switches are typically deployed as aggregate/access switches in large networks or as key switches in relatively small networks. Managed switches should support both L2 switching and L3 IP routing, but some switches only support L2 switching.

From a security point of view, the managed switches are the data plane (passing user traffic), the control plane (traffic sent between networking devices so that user traffic is sent to the correct destination) and the management plane (managing the network or the device itself). ). Traffic used to provide protection. It also provides network storm control, denial of service prevention, and many other features.

Managed Cisco services

The access control list function allows you to dynamically drop, rate limit, mirror or log traffic based on L2 address, L3 address, TCP/UDP port number, Ethernet type, ICMP or TCP flag, etc.

cisco-550x series

Managed switches provide a variety of features to protect the switch itself or the network from intentional or accidental denial of service attacks. Specifically, features include dynamic ARP inspection, IPv4 DHCP snooping, IPv6 first hop security with RA Guard, ND inspection, and neighbor binding integrity.

Additional security features may also be provided, such as user or device community isolation protection, private VLANs for security management (downloaded via SCP, web-based authentication, RADIUS/TACACS AAA, etc.). Features include Control Plane Policy (CoPP) for switch CPU protection and extensive 802.1x support (time based, dynamic VLAN assignment, port/host based, etc.).

In terms of scalability, these devices have a large table size, so you can create many VLANs for workgroups, devices (MAC table size), IP routes, ACL policies for use with flow-based security/QoS, etc.

The managed switch has L3 redundancy to provide the highest level of network availability and uptime using Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), a multi-link aggregation group used to improve scalability and resiliency, and spanning tree root guard/BPDU guard. Included. Supports L2 protection.

It also includes a wide variety of QoS and multicast features than smart switches. Managed switches include IGMP and MLD snooping, TCP congestion protection, 4-8 queues, L2 (802.1p) or L3 (DSCP/TOS) with the ability to optimize IPv4/v6 multicast traffic on the LAN to set up/tag and Supports traffic rate limiting. .

Other considerations

In addition to the differences between switch categories, other options such as network switch speed, number of ports, Power over Ethernet (PoE), and stacking capabilities should also be considered when choosing a switch.

Network switch speed

Network switches have different speeds. For fixed configuration switches, the speed ranges are Fast Ethernet (10/100Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000Mbps), 10 Gigabit (10/100/1000/10000Mbps) and 40/100Gbps. Some switches feature multi-gigabit technology, delivering speeds of over 1 gigabit even when connected to existing Category 5e/6 cables. Each switch has multiple uplink and downlink ports. The downlink connects to the end user and the uplink connects to another switch or network infrastructure.

Number of ports

Network switches come in a variety of sizes. Fixed configuration switches typically have 5/8/10/16/24/28/48/52 port configurations. These ports can be any combination of SFP/SFP+ slots for fiber optic connections, but they are usually copper ports with RJ-45 connectors on the front, so you can connect up to 100m. With fiber optic SFP modules, you can connect up to 40km.