"max vlan" what about this one?

[Marcus J]

Hi!
Why is the max vlan set as low as 8 vlans?

Is this some way of saving memory on switches or what?

[Mohieddin Kharnoub]

Hi

Max Vlans set to 8 by default to have more memory allocations.

Thats why when you change it, it will take affect when you reboot the switch.

One more thing interested for memory stuff, if you compare the ProCurve 5400 switch with the Cisco 6500 with its best Management module you will notice that,
ProCurve Switch can have up to 100,000 Routes in its routing table where the Cisco can have up to 500,000 routes.

Thats interesting, where you will have this huge number of the routes on a core switch.

But if you compare the switch fabric you will see that the ProCurve 5400 can have up to 692Gbps while the Cisco one reaches to 720Gbps.

The ProCurve 5400 is not Considered a Pure Core Router, and ProCurve don't call it that, while the Cisco 6500 is a Pure Core switch, but ProCurve is less 28G in switch fabric than the Cisco one, where the Cisco one should be at least 1.2Tbps or more because they call it a Core Switch.

I hope that explains what is the difference, and i like to have 50,000 static routes on the 5400 instead of 100,000 if i can get more than 720Gbps to compete with the Cisco6500.

Life is hard , isn't it ? :)

Good Luck !!!

[Marcus J]

So how much memory is saved if i set max vlan to lets say 64 instead of setting it at 256 on a 5300xl switch?

im not using more than 35 vlans today, but this is steadily increasing.

[Marcus J]

by the way the 5400zl series have only 10.000 entries in its routing table size, right?

[Mohieddin Kharnoub]

Hi

I can;t tell you how much you will have in memory when you change MAX Vlans to 35 or more, but i can tell you that performance will be affected if you changed to 256 Vlans, but you won't notice any performance difference if you changed to 36.

Yes 10,000 entries, sorry :)

Good Luck !!!

[Matt Hobbs]

I haven't seen any performance issues from simply enabling the maximum amount of vlans possible on a switch.

However, once you start enabling OSPF, PIM-DM, and some ACL's on many VLANs - it's more likely that you will start to see memory related warnings in the event-log.

Once the memory that can be programmed into hardware is used, the switch will start doing things via software which will be much slower.