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D
ESCRIPTION
OF
S
OFTWARE
F
EATURES
1-8
easily link network segments or VLANs together without having to deal
with the bottlenecks or configuration hassles normally associated with
conventional routers.
Routing for unicast traffic is supported with the Routing Information
Protocol (RIP) and the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol.
RIP – This protocol uses a distance-vector approach to routing. Routes are
determined on the basis of minimizing the distance vector, or hop count,
which serves as a rough estimate of transmission cost.
OSPF – This approach uses a link state routing protocol to generate a
shortest-path tree, then builds up its routing table based on this tree. OSPF
produces a more stable network because the participating routers act on
network changes predictably and simultaneously, converging on the best
route more quickly than RIP.
Router Redundancy – The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)
uses a virtual IP address to support a primary router and multiple backup
routers. The backups can be configured to take over the workload if the
master fails or to load share the traffic. The primary goal of this protocol is
to allow a host device which has been configured with a fixed gateway to
maintain network connectivity in case the primary gateway goes down.
Address Resolution Protocol – The switch uses ARP and Proxy ARP to
convert between IP addresses and MAC (i.e., hardware) addresses. This
switch supports conventional ARP, which locates the MAC address
corresponding to a given IP address. This allows the switch to use IP
addresses for routing decisions and the corresponding MAC addresses to
forward packets from one hop to the next. You can configure either static
or dynamic entries in the ARP cache.
Proxy ARP allows hosts that do not support routing to determine the
MAC address of a device on another network or subnet. When a host
sends an ARP request for a remote network, the switch checks to see if it
has the best route. If it does, it sends its own MAC address to the host. The
host then sends traffic for the remote destination via the switch, which
uses its own routing table to reach the destination on the other network.