Dell switches

We recently had a need for a managed l2 48-port gigabit ethernet 
switch, and a coworker found one from Dell that looked promising on paper. 
The specs were great, and the price was a fraction of that of a comparable 
cisco switch.  We're a cisco shop, but the price was too good to pass up, 
so we bought a Powerconnect 5448.

Initially, we're doing absolutely nothing fancy...just a single vlan, an 
IP on the switch's vlan1 interface for management, aaa radius 
authentication for management, a management ACL that prevents strangers 
from talking to the switch, rapid spanning tree, and jumbo frames.  What 
we've found is, like our experience with Dell switches some 5-8 years ago, 
their switches blow.

We have a couple of servers connected to the switch, and an uplink to one 
of our cisco 6500s.  Two of the servers run KVM, and when we start turning 
up virtual machines on the KVM servers, the Dell switch starts seeing CPU 
utilization spikes, we get packet loss pinging real servers attached to 
the Dell switch, the Dell's CLI gets sluggish, and the Dell will terminate 
telnet sessions (not because they're idle) to the CLI and sometimes stop 
accepting new ones for a short time.

Compared to cisco, the Dell CLI doesn't appear to give you a whole lot to 
look at as far as monitoring what's going on.  Neither does its web 
interface.  Is there some setting we're missing that's analogous to "no 
blow chunks" for the Dell's config?..or do these things just suck?

I upgraded it to the latest software (PowerConnect_54xx-20041.ros) before 
putting it in service.  In the release notes, it was said this release 
would fix a bug where the switch would spontaneously reboot after having 
been powered up "too long".  That wasn't encouraging.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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Eat sushi frequently. - Avi
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