A physical walkthrough of enterprise-grade switches and a router, covering port layouts, status indicators, uplink options, and key hardware features. Includes side-by-side comparisons of Cisco 2960, 3750, and 1800 series equipment.
Network Equipment Overview
I have a few switches here that we will look at, and then I will pull up a router and we will look at the router. The first thing you should notice with these switches is that all three of them are 48-port switches.
Typically these would be found on a rack. You would have these switches all mounted onto a rack, and then you would have patch cables, and those patch cables would plug into these different ports right here, and the other end would plug into either some sort of equipment, or into the jacks that go out to your users if this is an access switch. So we plug these ports into the different equipment that we have.
Right above the connector we have different lights, and the lights can tell us different information, such as the usage, or the speed, or different connection types, so we can gather different information from there. We can actually toggle through that information by pressing the button here on the right-hand side. As I press that, there are a few different LEDs and different ones light up, and that selects the different modes for what the LED displays and what it means.
On the other side here we have ports that would be our link ports to, let us say, other switches. This might be a link to another switch, possibly a server. These are our main connections that we are establishing with other equipment, and they would probably be a higher speed. There are the RJ45 connectors here, or we could use a GBIC connector, which is something that would slide in here and give it some additional functionality. For instance, let us say we wanted to use fiber optics, and we wanted to run from one switch to another switch. We could slide a GBIC into here and then connect the two switches using fiber optics.
This is a 2960 that we have right here, and it is a managed switch. I am going to flip it around and look at the back, and we see a few things on the back. One thing we see here is the power supply, so the power would plug in here, or if we had some DC power we could input it here and power this device through DC power. Typically you would see this unless you had some other setups on your racks. Over here is where the console port is, so the console is where we connect into this using our PC and start programming it. Right here you can see a little grid, an opening into the chassis. That is where this device is venting out, so the fan is right there and it is going to blow all that hot air out.
On our next switch here, same thing: we see 48 ports, and we see our GBIC here that we can add some additional functionality with. Over here we actually see four different ones on this particular one. Then we have the same button that we press right here with the LEDs, and the LEDs across here that display our different information regarding the different ports. There is one LED right here per port, and then a row of LEDs here that gives us different statuses of this machine and the mode in which it is displaying with these LEDs across here.
Let us take a look at our third switch. This is a 3750. Before I switch to that one, I will flip this around and show you that it has a special connector type in the back, and that is called a StackWise. These 3750s are amazing switches, and you can use a separate cable to connect the different switches, the backplanes of the switches, together for a much faster connection. We also have a console port across here. I cannot see it very well from my angle, but we have got a console port, we have got power, some of the same things that we saw on the other switch.
This 3750 is a little bit different, a little bit bigger. Both of the 3750s have power over Ethernet, so it can power things like phones. We have the same ports across here with the LEDs across here. The display for the mode that it is displaying is vertical rather than horizontal, and our button is across here on the top. Then this is an actual place where we can slide in some additional functionality, slide a little card in there and have some additional functionality.
What really makes this interesting is what we see if we turn it around and take a look at the back. Because this one is a much higher-end switch, it is able to deliver a lot more power, and it is also able to swap things out. There are hot swappable items on here in case something goes down, for instance the power. This is the power right here and I can slide one of these power units out. I have got two, so it has got redundancy involved with it. I can slide one of these out and replace it with a new one in case the power goes out. Same thing, I can slide out the fan; this is a fan unit, I can slide that out and replace the fan unit. We have the console port up here, and the StackWise again, to connect from switch to switch. So there are some switches and the hardware involved in the switches.
This is an 1800 series router. Routers typically have a much cleaner look to them and a lot less ports. Where a switch is designed to connect into lots of other devices, a router has a more specific purpose involved with it that requires a lot less ports. We do not see any ports across the front, so we flip it around and take a look at the back.
On the back we have a power switch on this. What is interesting, if you notice, is the switches did not have power switches; you just plugged them into power and they turned on, versus we actually have a switch to turn this on and off. We have got a power port right here. We have got our ports right here that we can configure; two of them are fast Ethernet, here for connecting into things. We have got a T1 type connector in here.
Both these ports right here are cards that you can slide in, so I have got this card populated and this card is not. If I wanted some additional functionality, I could slide a card into here to give it some additional functionality. Or if I did not want the T1, I could slide the T1 out and slide a different card in here. One of the cards might have additional ports that I could turn into switch ports, or possibly turn into more router ports, depending on my needs for that.
I have the console port right here. This also has an auxiliary. What the auxiliary is for is if this is in some sort of remote location and the router goes down, I cannot necessarily console into it because I do not have something connected to the console, and since the router is down I cannot actually get to it through SSH. So I may have some other device, a modem or something, connected into this to get into it and do some administration on it.
One other thing is that this one actually has some additional memory loaded into it, a flash card here that can be put into it to have some additional memory on this device.
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