IPv6 hardware support: new Cisco Catalyst 4948E Ethernet Switch

Cisco's new hardware: Catalyst 4948E Ethernet Switch.

Out of sky (DSC_0056),
originally uploaded by Li-Ji.

Cisco recently announced a new Data Center switch Cisco Catalyst 4948E. It has many feature better than previous 1-RU models of Cisco Catalyst 4900s. The most interesting one to me is its IPv6 hardware support.

IPv6 switching performance

110 mpps, better than even IPv4's performance of old Catalyst 4948 and 4948 10G.

Partial table captured on Cisco.com:

Feature	Cisco Catalyst 4948 Switch	Cisco Catalyst 4948 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch	Cisco Catalyst 4948E Switch
Performance
Switching capacity	96 Gbps	136 Gbps	176 Gbps
Throughput	72 million packets per second (mpps)	102 mpps	131-mpps IPv4 switching 110-mpps IPv6 switching

IPv6 Multicast Entries

IPv6 Multicast layer 3 entries: 16,000. Note: this is not the number of "groups". Each multicast group could have many entries. Each (S, G) pair is an entry.

I believe this number is about hardware entries. Once overflowing this number, newer entries would be software processed and thus slower in performance.

MAC Addresses

55,000 MAC address entries.

Some might wonder why a 48-access-port switch would ever need to hold so many MAC address entries. This is because of the popularity of server virtualization (such as VMWare, Xen, Hyper-V) in Data Center environment. When a single physical server holds hundreds of guest server instances, each single access port could also be populated with hundreds of virtual MAC addresses.

Reference for 4948E on Cisco.com

• Cisco Catalyst 4948E Ethernet Switch [Cisco Catalyst 4900 Series Switches] - Cisco Systems
• New Cisco Catalyst 4948E Ethernet Switch for High-Performance Data Center Access