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By Guest Contributor
March 1, 2001, 8:00am PST
There's a lot of Cisco material these days buzzing about multilayer
switches and the benefits they can afford the internetwork. But if
you're working in a production network or studying for your Cisco
exams, what you really need is to be armed with a good grasp of
exactly what a Layer 2 switch is and how a switch works within an
internetwork.
In my last Daily Drill Down, you learned about the OSI model and
how Cisco creates networks based on it. Cisco switches are
primarily sold as Layer 2 (Data Link) devices. This should tell you
that these switches perform their filtering and segmenting tasks
using only the hardware (MAC) address of a given device.
By default, Layer 2 switches break up collision domains but not
broadcast domains. You canpurchase optional cards from Cisco that
increase the switches functionality into the routing arena, thereby
allowing them to also break up broadcast domains. But I'm not
going there in this Daily Drill Down. First things, first. For now, we're
only going to look into how Cisco switches are used in an
internetwork at Layer 2.
Layer 2 switching
As I said, Layer 2 switching is hardware-based, meaning it uses the
Media Access Control (MAC) address from the host's network
interface cards (NICs) to filter the network. Cisco switches use
application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) within their switches
to build and maintain filter tables. Since all network segments aren't
concerned with the same types of data, it's quite advantageous in
terms of efficiency to be able to "shelter" various segments from
having certain types of data unnecessarily traversing them. And
switch filter tables do exactly thatthey exist to prevent unwanted or
unneeded traffic from traversing certain network segments.
ure A
Hubs, like repeaters, don't examine any traffic as the signal enters a
port or as it is transmitted onward to other network segments. Hubs
create a physical star network topology where the hub is a central
device and cables radiate outward from it in all directions (creating a
visual "star" effect). But Ethernet networks use a logical bus
topology instead. What's a logical bus topology? Well, buses run
from one end of a route to the other end, stopping at all bus stops
along their given routes, right? It's the same concept that gives
logical bus topology its namethe signal has to run from end to end
on the network, and every device connected to the hub, or hubs,
must listen if a device transmits.
If two devices on this network send a digital signal simultaneously, a
ure B
collision occurs. When that happens, a jam signal is sent from the
transmitting devices telling the rest of the devices on the network not
to transmit. All devices then start a back-off algorithm clock. This is
set to a predetermined amount of time, plus a random number, so
that no two devices will begin transmitting again at the same time
(we hope).
Layer 2 switches
Since building our networks on hope is not a good idea, switches
were developed to address the hub-related hope issue existing in an
Ethernet network. The greatest benefit gained by using switches
instead of hubs is that each switch port is its own collision domain.
Remember? Switches can provide this cool feature because they
segment your network by MAC (hardware) address. But also recall
that switches do not break up broadcast domains, meaning that if a
device sends a broadcast, all devices connected to that switch must
listen.
Another benefit of using switches instead of hubs in your network is
shown in Figure B.
ure C
When host A sends a broadcast, the frame is sent out to all ports
except the one the frame was originally received on.
To break up broadcast domains, we've traditionally used routers. In
many ways, you can think of a router as a Layer 3 switch because
packets received on an interface are switched to an exit port
specified by routing table entries. Presently, more and more devices
are being designed and built as multilayer switches, which gives us
a bunch of functions all in one box.
Layer 2 switching in an internetwork
Layer 2 switching is efficient because there's no modification to the
data packet; if the frame is going from one Ethernet segment to
These new technologies are allowing more data to flow off of local
subnets and onto a routed network. Therefore, this is where a
router's performance, or lack thereof, can produce the bane of many
a networkthe bottleneck.
Cisco Catalyst switches
Here's some information on Cisco switches and what is
available today. This information changes almost every month
(seriously), so either check out Cisco's Web site or a reseller for
the most current information.
Closet switches
Cisco calls this layer the access layer, as this is the point where
users gain access to the internetwork. The switches that Cisco
recommends at this layer are listed below:
4000 provides a 10/100/1000Mbps advanced highperformance enterprise solution for up to 96 users and up
to 36 Gigabit Ethernet ports for servers.