Cisco Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module for HP p-Class BladeSystem Software Configuration Guide

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Chapter 1 Overview

Features

Performance Features

The switch ships with these performance features:

• Autosensing of port speed and autonegotiation of duplex mode on all switch ports for optimizing

bandwidth

• Automatic-medium-dependent interface crossover (auto-MDIX) capability on 10/100 and

10/100/1000 Mb/s interfaces that enables the interface to automatically detect the required cable

connection type (straight-through or crossover) and to configure the connection appropriately

• Support for up to 9000 bytes for frames that are bridged in hardware and up to 2000 bytes for frames

that are bridged by software

• IEEE 802.3x flow control on all ports (the switch does not send pause frames)

• EtherChannel for enhanced fault tolerance and for providing up to 8 Gb/s (Gigabit EtherChannel)

full-duplex bandwidth among switches, routers, and servers

• Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) and Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) for automatic

creation of EtherChannel links

• Forwarding of Layer 2 packets at Gigabit line rate

• Per-port storm control for preventing broadcast, multicast, and unicast storms

• Port blocking on forwarding unknown Layer 2 unknown unicast, multicast, and bridged broadcast

traffic

• Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping for IGMP Versions 1, 2, and 3 for

efficiently forwarding multimedia and multicast traffic

• IGMP report suppression for sending only one IGMP report per multicast router query to the

multicast devices (supported only for IGMPv1 or IGMPv2 queries)

• IGMP snooping querier support to configure switch to generate periodic IGMP General Query

messages

• Multicast VLAN registration (MVR) to continuously send multicast streams in a multicast VLAN

while isolating the streams from subscriber VLANs for bandwidth and security reasons

• IGMP filtering for controlling the set of multicast groups to which hosts on a switch port can belong

• IGMP throttling for configuring the action when the maximum number of entries is in the IGMP

forwarding table

• IGMP leave timer for configuring the leave latency for the network