Re: Recommendations for gigabit switches?
Jeff Siddall <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.redhat.k12osn |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 02/28/2012 05:36 PM, Joseph Bishay wrote: > I do understand the different between the unmanaged vs. managed > switches in terms of controls, vlans, etc. I guess my question more > accurately is, in an LTSP environment (thin clients connecting to > server) why do I need a managed server? If you have a flat network and don't want to do anything special then yes, you can go entirely unmanaged. However, even in a relatively simple environment, there are significant benefits to a managed switch, which I have listed below in my personal order of importance: 1. You can segregate traffic. I have "privileged" ports that can reach the LTSP server plus other stuff like printers and file servers. I also have public ports that are much more locked down. VLANs enable this type capability. You can also do handy stuff like using VLANs to allow separate client images. If you configure the DHCP server with different options for different subnets (VLANs) then you can change how a client boots simply by changing it's switch port VLAN. Because this is all done from an IP management interface there are never cables to pull to make changes so you can do pretty much anything remotely. The related aspect of this is that you can also use VLANs in linux to allow a server to talk to multiple VLANs over a single physical NIC. 2. As others also noted, you can track down MAC addresses, find misbehaving NICs, traffic statistics, etc. 3. Fancy stuff, like LAG (link aggregation), or anything else that requires any amount of configuration, simply can't be done on an unmanaged switch. 4. If you get a L3 (routing) switch then you don't have to use servers for routing. L3 switches offer much higher performance than software routers. There are many more benefits also but that should give you some ideas. Jeff _______________________________________________ K12OSN mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>