Users Guide

90 Switch Feature Overview
Auto-negotiation
Auto-negotiation allows the switch to advertise modes of operation. The
auto-negotiation function provides the means to exchange information
between two switches that share a point-to-point link segment and to
automatically configure both switches to take maximum advantage of their
transmission capabilities.
Dell EMC Networking N-Series switches enhance auto-negotiation by
providing configuration of port advertisement. Port advertisement allows the
system administrator to configure the port speeds that are advertised.
For information about configuring auto-negotiation, see "Port
Characteristics" on page 649.
Storm Control
When layer-2 frames are processed, broadcast, unknown unicast, and
multicast frames are flooded to all ports on the relevant virtual local area
network (VLAN). The flooding occupies bandwidth and loads all nodes
connected on all ports. Storm control limits the amount of broadcast,
unknown unicast, and multicast frames accepted and forwarded by the
switch.
For information about configuring Broadcast Storm Control settings, see
"Port-Based Traffic Control" on page 921.
Port Mirroring
Port mirroring mirrors network traffic by forwarding copies of incoming and
outgoing packets from multiple source ports to a monitoring port. Source
ports may be VLANs, Ethernet interfaces, port-channels, or the CPU port.
The switch also supports flow-based mirroring, which allows copying certain
types of traffic to a single destination port using an ACL. This provides
flexibility—instead of mirroring all ingress or egress traffic on a port the
switch can mirror a subset of that traffic. The switch can be configured to
mirror flows based on certain kinds of layer-2, layer-3, and layer-4 information.
Destination (probe) ports must be connected to a passive monitoring device.
Traffic sent from the probe into the switch probe port is dropped. Mirrored
traffic sent to the probe device will contain control plane traffic such as
spanning-tree, LLDP, DHCP, etc.