Home Lab Gear: Cisco SG300-10 Layer 3 switch gets even better
This is a guest post by Andy Grant.
Vladan has previously covered this great little SMB switch from Cisco in his post My homelab – The Network design with Cisco SG 300 – a Layer 3 switch for €199.
Cisco has just released the long awaited firmware revision version 1.1. Notable improvements include Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) support and a full CLI.
For those of you who are not familiar with CDP, it provides network topology information to connected devices. This can be greatly beneficial to determine what port a VMNIC is connected to on the switch.
The CDP information is displayed by clicking the little information box beside the physical adapter when browsing the network configuration of a host.
By default, all vSwitches are set to listen for CDP messages. This provides a one-way street for determining network topology. vSphere does support listening and advertising CDP messages.
To determine the current CDP setting:
TSM/COS: esxcfg-vswitch -b vSwitch0
vMA: vixcfg-vswitch -b vSwitch0
To enable both listen and advertise:
TSM/COS: esxcfg-vswitch -B both vSwitch0
vMA: vixcfg-vswitch -B both vSwitch0
After enabling CDP “both” on the vSwitch, the SG300 will provide the following:
Review the release notes and known issues before updating. Full changelog here https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-17092
Happy labbing 🙂
