Supported Technologies; Layer 2 Switching; Ieee 802.1Q-Based Virtual Local Area Network - HP ProLiant BL p-Class GbE2 User Manual

Introduction

Supported Technologies

The ProLiant BL p-Class GbE2 Interconnect Switch supports the following technologies.

Layer 2 Switching

The ProLiant BL p-Class GbE2 Interconnect Switch uses 10/100/1000 Gigabit Layer 2
switching technology. Layer 2 refers to the Data Link layer of the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) model, which is concerned with moving data packets across a network
by enforcing Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD). This layer
performs the following tasks:
•
Ethernet packet framing
•
Medium Access Control (MAC) addressing
•
Physical medium transmission error detection
•
Medium allocation (collision avoidance)
•
Contention resolution (collision handling)
Layer 2 switching technology allows the GbE2 Interconnect Switch to look into data packets
and redirect them based on the destination MAC address. This reduces traffic congestion on
the network because packets, instead of being transmitted to all ports, are transmitted to the
destination port only.

IEEE 802.1Q-based Virtual Local Area Network

The ProLiant BL p-Class GbE2 Interconnect Switch provides support for a total of 255 IEEE
802.1Q Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) for server grouping and isolation. A VLAN is
a network segment configured according to a logical scheme rather than a physical layout.
VLANs can be used to combine any collection of local area network (LAN) segments into an
autonomous user group that appears as a single LAN.
VLANs also logically segment the physical network into different broadcast domains so that
packets are forwarded only between ports within the VLAN. This technology enhances
performance by conserving bandwidth and improves security by limiting traffic to specific
domains. For example, you may want to isolate the server blade iLO ports from the rest of the
NICs. The iLO ports on interconnect Switch B can be assigned to their own VLAN and go to
a dedicated uplink or share an uplink using VLAN tagging.
IMPORTANT: The greater the number of VLANs, the greater the GbE2 Interconnect Switch central
processing unit (CPU) utilization. For maximum interconnect switch performance, HP recommends that
you be judicious when configuring the number of VLANs.
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HP ProLiant BL p-Class GbE2 Interconnect Switch User Guide