[c-nsp] WIC-4ESW world's smallest Catalyst?

[Tom]

At 03:20 PM 11/5/2004, you wrote:
>Bradley Urberg Carlson wrote:
>>I have need of a really small switch, say 2 10/100 trunk ports to 
>>separate Catalysts, and one 10/100 uplink to a C3640.  From some snippets 
>>of config I've seen, it appears as though the WIC-4ESW is a sort-of 
>>5-port "Cat-on-a-card," and I was wondering if I might use such a WIC in 
>>the 3640, instead of using a Catalyst switch external to the C3640.
>
>As someone already pointed out, the WIC-4ESW is only supported on 1700 
>routers.
>
>On 3640 You have option of using NM-16ESW, which is 16 ports 10/100
>switch. You'll need IP Plus feature-set. The switching is wire-speed,
>inter-VLAN routing will depend on Your CPU resources. Of course You
>can do rate-limiting etc. on logical VLAN interfaces.
>
>Considering the cost of NM-16ESW, You can go for either Cat2940,
>which won't route, has only 8 ports, can be configured to
>do trunking (802.1Q only) and is almost twice cheaper, or buy entire
>router (!) cheaper than the network module - 1711 or 1712. It has
>WIC-4ESW integrated, along with mounted fifth FastEthernet, and either
>analog or ISDN BRI WIC. It has also VPN module, 96MB RAM and software
>with firewall, IDS and VPNs. It may be the wisest and most
>flexible solution.

This is not as powerful a solution as you would hope.  The bus in the 1700 
routers is only capable of 10Mbps speed so you will not see much 
performance between the built in 10/100 port and the wic-4esw card.  We 
discovered this hidden in the Cisco literature after buying a 1721 and this 
card last year.

Tom

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