Catalyst "flowcontrol" command. Anything I need to do in Meraki?

ZachCCNA
Conversationalist

Catalyst "flowcontrol" command. Anything I need to do in Meraki?

We're upgrading our switches from Catalyst to Meraki.  I got a Catalyst 2960 and on a few switchports it has the "flowcontrol receive desired" command.  These are ports that connects to either servers, VMs or iDRAC systems.

 

These switches were put in a long time ago and were programmed by someone before my boss and my time with the company.

 

The question came up as to whether or not we need to be worried about anything when putting in Meraki switches in place of the Catalyst switches.  Based on some research this seems to be a Cisco only thing, and that I would not really need to worry much about "flowcontrol" when upgrading to Meraki.  But I need more to present to my boss before I move on with the upgrade project.

 

Thanks

2 Replies 2
alemabrahao
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I wouldn't worry about that, but if you're still unsure, you can open a support case with Meraki.

I am not a Cisco Meraki employee. My suggestions are based on documentation of Meraki best practices and day-to-day experience.

Please, if this post was useful, leave your kudos and mark it as solved.
Brash
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Flow control is used to control the amount of frames that are sent over a link. It's used in scenarios where dropping a frame is a worse outcome than telling the sender to wait before sending. Most commonly it's seen in FCOE deployments and sometimes in iSCSI deployments because dropping storage packets can be problematic.

 

The 'desired' setting just means that the switch is open to the other side sending flow control packets but won't require it, nor send flow control packets unless the other side first initiates.

 

Meraki switches don't support flow control. You can check whether flow control is actually in use on the Catalyst interface by running "show interface x/y flow-control detail" (or a similar command) to see if pause frames are actually being seen.

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