Cisco Systems Inc. supports a broad range of local area network (LAN) switching architecture technologies and platforms. The general minimal requirements that the Cisco switching platforms are designed to address include the following: High-performance switched Ethernet, capable of delivering 100 Mbps and 1Gbps to the desktop, and 1Gbps or 10Gbps uplinks. Quality of Service (QoS) […]
Deleting the VLAN Database from a Cisco Switch
If you have your own Cisco switch equipment at your home lab or at your work environment you might have encountered the situation that you want to completely erase the whole switch configuration including any VLANs that are already configured on the switch (usually the vlan.dat file). In a Cisco switch, erasing the switch startup […]
Cisco Switch Network Design
I was browsing the Cisco support forum the other day and found the following question post which is about designing a Cisco switched network. Some useful answers are given, so I thought I would repost here for my blog readers. You will find useful tips about switch port dimensioning, redundancy etc. I Hope you find […]
How to Configure Cisco VTP – VLAN Trunk Protocol
In a previous post I explained how to configure VLANs on Cisco Switches. That was a simple scenario with just two switches connected with a trunk port and having shared VLANs belonging to both switches. Now, imagine the situation where you need to manage a huge Layer 2 switched network with tens or hundreds of […]
How to Configure VLANs on a Cisco Switch
This post will deal with configuring Layer 2 VLANs on Cisco switches. Up to 4094 VLANs can be configured on Cisco catalyst switches. By default, only VLAN 1 is configured on the switch, so if you connect hosts on an out-of-the-box switch they all belong to the same Layer 2 broadcast domain. The need to […]
Cisco Switches with Power over Ethernet PoE
Cisco has been supporting the standardized 802.3af power over ethernet feature since 2004. Catalyst switches with PoE are available as 10/100 PoE or even 10/100/1000 PoE. The Power over Ethernet feature is an excellent option for deployments of Cisco IP Phones. Wireless access points and security cameras can also be powered by PoE switches. The […]
Configuring a Cisco Catalyst Switch SPAN mirroring port
For Network Engineers, the ability to mirror switch traffic and send it to a sniffer for analysis is an essential troubleshooting technique. All Cisco Catalyst switches support the Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) feature which copies traffic from specified switch source ports or VLANs and mirrors this traffic to a specified destination switch port (SPAN port). […]