4 port trunk over fibre - advice needed please :) 1

[cornburn]

Hi

I'm hoping to pick some brains here. It will be a relatively simple question for most of you I'm sure.

We have an 1800-G in a remote suite with a 1Gbit fibre link to a 2510 in the server room. 99% of the traffic from the server will be going down the fibre link to the remote suite, so I am trying to work out the best way to set this up. In brief the physical setup is

Clients - 1Gb Copper - 1800G - 1Gb fibre - 2510 - 1Gb copper - Server

If I put a 1Gb copper link between the 2510 and the server can I set up the link so that the data doesn't have to be switched in the server room, by configuring the copper port to send data directly down the fibre to the other switch (which has all the clients connected to it) The 1800 also supports jumbo frames so I want to know if this will be useable by creating a direct link. I assume if all the data has to be processed by the 2510 switch then it won't be supported. If I can create a link between the 2 and the data is all passed directly to the server card (which supports jumbo frames) then I guess this will be ok.

I want to make sure it works as well as possible, unfortunately we were unable to hook the fibre up directly to the server so looking for the best plan B. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as it's all on a 100m shared link at the moment and streaming video isn't working too well!

Thanks

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

So you are suggesting a direct link from the 1800G via fibre to the server? You will need to add a fibre interface to the server to do this.

If the server can't be given a new fibre interface, then it will have to come off its existing interface via the 2510.

If you think the 1800G-2510 link isn't big enough, increase it to 2Gb by aggregating a 2nd fibre link with the existing one.

 

[cornburn]

Hi Vince

Thanks for that. The fibre can't go directly to the server, it will have to go through the 2510. The 1Gb link will be enough for now, what I'm unsure of is whether there's any way of pushing all traffic from port 26 (fibre) to port 24 (copper to server), in essence to give the server a direct link to the remote 1800G. I'm thinking that by sending all data through the switching processes of the 2510 it will slow the link down unnecessarily, when we know all data will be passed down the fibre to the remote room?

Also if we can create some sort of pipe for all the data to travel down this might enable us to use jumbo frames, which we can't do if data is being passed through the 2510.

So in simple terms, is there a way of connecting to the interface on the 2510 and telling it to send all data from 24 down 26 and vice versa so that the 1800G at the far end would appear to be connected directly to the server and jumbo frames could be enabled?

Thanks for your help so far, as you can see I'm a little confused as to the best way to set this up :S

Cheers

 

[cornburn]

PS Sorry for the misleading title, I was originally looking at trunking 4 100Mb ports as we didn't have a 1Gb port available on the 2510 and I can't edit the title.

 

[cajuntank]

Jumbo frames can only be enabled for entire networks. Unless you can enable jumbo frames for every host, switch, server, etc... that is on that physical network, then your only option for getting jumbo frames to work would be to enable a separate VLAN and enable jumbo frames on that vlan subnet (assuming you have equipment that supports jumbo frames and can do the L3 routing between the VLANs so they can talk to each other).

If your trying to get better throughput from switch to switch, then your only option (and this is not me looking at the specs for your equipment) is creating trunk ports at the 1Gb level between switches. HP switches max out at 4 ports in a trunk; but understand, while adding ports to a trunk gives you more "interstate lanes", it does not increase the "speed limit".

My guess is your not hardly touching the utilization of the 1Gb pipe unless your doing something like IP video.
Jumbo frames won't get you any real bump in performance for you regular data traffic. Save the jumbo frames if you ever create a dedicated storage network.

 

[cornburn]

Thanks for the very helpful responses, I'll just set it up as usual for now then and leave all the fancy settings alone, I just wanted to make sure they were used if possible but it sounds like jumbo frames is a no goer anyway. I'll monitor the 1Gb link because as you say that might be plenty for the moment.

Thanks again