What is a network switch and how does it work?
Hello everyone in today’s session we are going to discuss about switches types of switches difference between layer 2 and layer 3 switch also we’ll see how switches forward frames and Popa leads the MAC address table at the end I will list some of the commonly used Cisco switch models switches are key building blocks for any network.
Switch has multiple ports and it connects multiple devices such as computers, laptops, wireless access points, printers, CCTV cameras and servers on the same lan network with in a building or a campus a switch enables connected devices to share information and talk to each devices.
It is called layer 2 device because it works on the layer 2 of the OSI model and it uses MAC address in order to share data from one end to the other. It learns the physical address of the device that are connected to this switch and store the physical address called MAC address table or MAC table or cam table unlike hub.
Details of Switches
Switch is an intelligent device switches are ASIC based ASIC stands for application specific integrated circuits. This feature helps the switch to make the switching decisions very quickly every port on a switch is on a different collision domain. That is a switch is a collision domain so greater all the ports on switch are by default in the same broadcast domain a broadcast domain contains.
All the devices can reach each other at the data link layer that is OSI layer 2
Types Of network Switches
There are two types of switches unmanaged switch and a managed switch.
An Un-managed switch is designed so that you can simply plug them in and they work without any configuration required. Un-managed switches are typically for basic connectivity. you will often see them use in home or wherever a few ports are needed one of the example of unmanaged which includes his Co hundred series switch – witches can be configured to custom fit to your network – which is give you greater security and more feature with a greater control and flexibility.
you can better protect your network and improve the quality of service for those who access the network one of the example of – which is in the data center our Cisco Nexus 7 K series switches.
Switches are further divided into two types layer 2 and layer 3.
layer 2 Switch
A layer 2 switch works with MAC address only and does not care about the IP address. Layer 2 switches basically do switching only which means they operate using devices MAC address to redirect the data packets from the source ports to the destination port for the inter VLAN communication link.
On layer 2 switch an external layer to your router will be required for the devices to communicate a layer 3 switch or a multi-layer switch can do all the job that a layer 2 switch thus additionally.
Layer 3 Switch
It can do state static routing and dynamic routing that means a layer 3 switch has both MAC address table and IP routing table and it handles entering in travel and communication and packet routing between different VLANs. As well as how switches forward train and dynamically properly it’s a switch MAC address table.
let’s take an example of small network with a PC and a laptop connected to a switch. when you first boot up the switch it has something known as cam table or MAC address table. A MAC address table is essentially empty and it is going to include our MAC address. That is going to learn from the end devices on our network let’s say the PC has the MAC address with cover of zeros and 1 and the laptop has a magnitude of couple of zeros and 2 let’s say if you want to ping from PCA to PCB IP address now does a PCB VCAs $1 $1 1.1 and PCB is 1.1.2 next to communicate with the PCB the PCA sends an art message arpan.
A nutshell is a communication protocol used to resolve the layer to address associated with the layer tree address. That is the IP address a switch receipt the PCA sends a frame and the switch receives the frame of from pca on FA 0/1 which examines.
The source MAC address and compares it to the MAC address table if the MAC address is not available in the Mac table it associates. The source MAC address of PCA with the English for every 0/1 in MAC address table after the switch has recorded the source address information.
The switch examines the destination MAC address if the destination MAC is not available in the Mac table to switch floods. The frame to all the ports except the ingress port then the distinction device PCB applies to the frame with the unique cars frame address to PC a the switch enters the source MAC address of PCB and the port number of the ingress put in the address table.
The destination address of the frame and its associated English port is found in the MAC address table. The switch can now forward the frame between the source and the destination devices without flooding because it has entries in the table that identify the Associated ports Cisco offers some exciting model of switches that can be used depending on the requirement and the network you have Cisco Catalyst 3650 series switches can be used as a lamb access switches.
Since co-catalyst thousand series switches can be used as LAN compact switches Cisco Catalyst 1000 series switches can be used as lamb : switches Cisco Catalyst 9600 series used in distribution switches and at the last Cisco nexus 9000 Series switches are the next generation leaders in the switches.
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