[c-nsp] Scaling L2

[Benjamin Lovell]

The low hanging fruit for something like this would be to make sure you prune your vlans and don't send vlans to switches that have no need for them. This should reduce broadcast and MAC learning to some extent depending on your network layout. For the 3K series switches diff SMD templates can recarve TCAM depending on your use case. Changing from default to VLAN on the 3750 for example will double the size of the MAC table. Be careful about what you will loose here though. The VLAN template will remove all L3 switching resources and all routing will get punted to software. 

-Ben

On Jan 9, 2011, at 7:12 PM, T Johnson wrote:

> I have a virtualization environment that is quickly growing and I tend
> to use "smaller" catalyst 2xxx and 3xxx series switches. One problem I
> see coming up is running out of MAC address table space on these
> switches as well as tons of L2 broadcast traffic.
> 
> My question is this: does cisco have a way to deal with this when
> you'd want to keep things in one L2 domain (rather than
> forcing L3 boundaries)? I see the TRILL/fabricpath stuff, but of
> course it only runs on switches I don't have the budget for.
> 
> Dreaming up things... it would seem fairly easy if I could just
> "route" sets of MAC addresses out to different connected switches.
> It's fairly easy to assign MAC addresses on the server side to help support
> this. Anything like this possible? Or another solution?
> 
> Thanks
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