Microsoft ES4612 Switch User Manual


 
Description of Software Features
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DHCP Server and DHCP Relay – A DHCP server is provided to assign IP
addresses to host devices. Since DHCP uses a broadcast mechanism, a DHCP
server and its client must physically reside on the same subnet. Since it is not
practical to have a DHCP server on every subnet, DHCP Relay is also supported to
allow dynamic configuration of local clients from a DHCP server located in a different
network.
Port Configuration – You can manually configure the speed, duplex mode, and
flow control used on specific ports, or use auto-negotiation to detect the connection
settings used by the attached device. Use the full-duplex mode on ports whenever
possible to double the throughput of switch connections. Flow control should also be
enabled to control network traffic during periods of congestion and prevent the loss
of packets when port buffer thresholds are exceeded. The switch supports flow
control based on the IEEE 802.3x standard.
Rate Limiting – This feature controls the maximum rate for traffic transmitted or
received on an interface. Rate limiting is configured on interfaces at the edge of a
network to limit traffic into or out of the network. Traffic that falls within the rate limit is
transmitted, while packets that exceed the acceptable amount of traffic are dropped.
Port Mirroring – The switch can unobtrusively mirror traffic from any port to a
monitor port. You can then attach a protocol analyzer or RMON probe to this port to
perform traffic analysis and verify connection integrity.
Port Trunking – Ports can be combined into an aggregate connection. Trunks can
be manually set up or dynamically configured using IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation
Control Protocol (LACP). The additional ports dramatically increase the throughput
across any connection, and provide redundancy by taking over the load if a port in
the trunk should fail. The switch supports up to 6 trunks.
Broadcast Storm Control – Broadcast suppression prevents broadcast traffic from
overwhelming the network. When enabled on a port, the level of broadcast traffic
passing through the port is restricted. If broadcast traffic rises above a pre-defined
threshold, it will be throttled until the level falls back beneath the threshold.
Static Addresses – A static address can be assigned to a specific interface on this
switch. Static addresses are bound to the assigned interface and will not be moved.
When a static address is seen on another interface, the address will be ignored and
will not be written to the address table. Static addresses can be used to provide
network security by restricting access for a known host to a specific port.
IEEE 802.1D Bridge – The switch supports IEEE 802.1D transparent bridging. The
address table facilitates data switching by learning addresses, and then filtering or
forwarding traffic based on this information. The address table supports up to 16K
addresses.
Store-and-Forward Switching – The switch copies each frame into its memory
before forwarding them to another port. This ensures that all frames are a standard
Ethernet size and have been verified for accuracy with the cyclic redundancy check
(CRC). This prevents bad frames from entering the network and wasting bandwidth.