Hi. My name is Ken Varga. I work in Dell's Enterprise Expert Center in the PowerConnect U and we're here to demonstrate some of the features of our PowerConnect 6224 and 6248 switches.
Right now I'm going to demonstrate stacking. As you can see I have already connected the cables to the stacking modules. I'll go ahead and plug them in and then we'll go around front. Now we'll go around front and look at the switch interface. These are the two switches that we connected up these stacking modules and cables to.
This is a PowerConnect 6224, and this is a PowerConnect 6248. 24 and 48 ports, respectively. Now we'll go ahead and configure them. I'm going to configure them using the wizard. When the switch boots up without any configuration, it will ask you if you want to use the wizard, and you just answer a few questions for your basic configuration. You can use any BT100 emulator.
I happen to be using tera term; you can use hyperterminal in the native Windows program. We'll go ahead and restart the switch. It's going through posts, powering on. Testing itself.
You can make a choice here or it will time out and load the current firmware. It's going through the process of deciding who will be the stack master. And here we have the question do we want to run the setup wizard. I'll say yes. Enter Y. It will begin to ask you a few questions.
I'll go ahead and skip the SNMP configuration at this time. Enter -- I'll enter a user name. Prompts you for the password. Password must be at least eight digits. Now, the IP address of the stack. And the subnet mask. You can do it either in dotted decimal format or CIDR notation.
I've entered the IP address and the subnet mask. And now a default gateway. It will give you a chance to save it or discard it. We're going to save it. And it will bring it up to the command line. And from here now that we have an IP address we will open up the Web interface. Simply enter the IP address in your Web browser address line. And then use the user name and password that you've configured. Here we have a graphical representation of the master switch, unit No. Unit No. 1. This is the 24 port switch.
Any ports that are active will be green. Nothing plugged into these others. Also shows you a graphical representation of what's on the front of the switch. You can also look at Unit No. 2. That's our 48 port switch in our stack, and nothing plugged into any of these units. Any of these ethernet ports.
And you have a tree system on the left-hand side to go through the different features that you can configure. You can check the health of the unit, check the power supplies and the fans on both your Unit No. 1 and 2, any units you have stacked in this stack. You can check your version of firmware, which is the operating system of the switch, and upgrade whenever the need arises.
And that's the current firmware version, current software on this switch. Receiving time from an SNTP server. So you can keep the proper time on the switch. It has logging capabilities to several locations. We'll go through the global settings first. Several different kinds of logs. It will log to console, which is your hyperterminal.
Log to memory and to log file. You can also send logs to a remote log server. We'll take a look at a few of the logs. RAM log, which is lost upon a reboot. Just informational. Here you have different levels of logging. Informational up to debugging. Shows you some of the occurrences on this switch.
Going back to the global settings, there's your debugging. And currently we don't have that enabled. So we're not seeing everything. It's informational. Notice, warnings, et cetera,. We'll go through a few more features. Here's where you would set some IP addresses on your management interface. And the IP address is automatically assigned to VLAN 1.
You're using the layer three routing capabilities of the switch. VLAN 1 is not routable. You may want to move that management VLAN to another VLAN. This is the IP address. I assigned using the wizard. You have various management security capabilities. You can limit management access to the switch to specific protocols, telnet, SSH, http, https, etc., and you can authenticate to a radio server if you'd like to do that or TACACC server. Has SNMP capabilities.
You can advertise its presence to your network monitoring system software, and send out alerts, traps, whenever there might be a problem to that monitoring software. Let's go down here to Copy Files category. You can copy your configuration. From the running the start-up, and you always need to do that to keep it in permanent memory.
You can also restore your factory defaults here. And if there are ever any firmware upgrades, you can copy them down from a FTP server. Regarding the stacking capabilities, the main reason to stack is so that you can manage all your switches from one interface. This particular switch model can have up to 12 48 port switches, up to 576 ethernet ports managed from one interface. We happen to have 72 in our little two stack configuration. Okay. We'll go ahead and go into the switching category now. I'll collapse that tree. Spanned out switching, and again we were demonstrating our stacking.
Let's go directly to the ports category. We'll go to the port configuration. You can configure your individual ports here. There's our unit one, our master switch. Port g1. Or we can take a look at all of our ports all at once. That will take a minute to load. We have 72 ports in this stack. Here we go. You can see all your No. 1 unit ports.
Next page we can see all the Unit 2 ports as well. So if you had, again, up to 12 units, you could have all 576 ports to be managed through this one interface. And as it's both a layer two and a layer three switch, you can create VLANs, assign ports to different VLANs that you've created.
Currently all the ports, we have no VLANs configured. All the ports are in VLAN 1. Untagged. There's no other VLANs configured. Assign any aggregated links to a VLAN if you have created aggregated links. You can configure either stack aggregated links or dynamic. And you have port mirroring capabilities.
You can mirror one port to another. You would have a source port that you would want to capture traffic on. You have a destination port. Then you would configure a source port if you configure it would show right underneath here. If you want to capture what's going on on a particular port, that's where you would do it. Pick that up with your monitoring software. Switch does have various spanning tree capabilities.
Your default spanning tree type is rapid spanning tree. And you have various spanning tree settings that can be configured to optimize spanning tree to your specification, you can get quite a bit of statistics out of this switch. For instance, interface statistics, you can tell what you have coming through the port in terms of unicast, multi cast or broadcast, as well as errors.
Ether-like statistics if you're doing any troubleshooting, you suspect hardware issues, cable issues, here's where you would look. And again being a layer three switch, you have routing capabilities. Basic routing capabilities are if you create VLANs you assign an IP address to each VLAN, and use that IP address in each VLAN as the default gateway for the respective nodes downstream.
It also has the ability for using OSPF protocol and RIP. And the switch is also IPv6 capable. And that is coming into play very soon. So this switch is ready to use the new IP addressing scheme.
And you can configure quality of service of two different types, either differentiated services or class of service in case you want to give priority to specific types of traffic, possibly voice over IP traffic to give that preferential treatment. And this concludes my presentation today. I hope that you've learned a few things about our new switch.
And thank you very much.
