Re: Dell switches

We use more HP switches than I can count.  They work fine.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

Composed on a virtual keyboard, please forgive typos. 


On Jul 2, 2010, at 19:56, Jon Lewis <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.
> 
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Eat sushi frequently. - Avi
[email protected] is the human contact address.
[email protected] is the list posting address.
See below URL for subscribe/unsubscribe and list options:
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