RE: Dell switches

Been through the same headache as you :)  have a customer who yanked their Dell switches at the top of each rack and just slapped in Cisco 3560's.

I still love the Cisco stuff for the features, but for some of the smaller deployments we have been doing we have been using some of the Adtran switches.  Some of the features that you see in these little blue switches are right up there with the Cisco, I'd probably compare them to the 2900 and 3500 series Cisco switches.  For the price of a WS-C2960S-48TS-L you can get a pair of Adtran Netvanta 1534 (1702590G1) which are half width switches with 24 ports of gig and 4x SFP's.  Put 2 of these in 1u, and you have your 48 port managed layer 2 switch, plus you have layer3 lite fucntions and 8 SFP's for uplinks.

Adtran stuff is everywhere, and the more I work with their switches, the more I like them.  The GUI is very similar to IOS and their support is great to work with if you ever need it.  

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon Lewis
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 5:57 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: 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.

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  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
[email protected] is the human contact address.
[email protected] is the list posting address.
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