MS425 Performace Information

[whistleblower]

Hi all,

I'm thinking about replacing current C9K (C9300-24T) switches with a flexible stack of MS425-32! Also the MS-425 should act instead of the Customer Firewall in the new setup as Standard-Gateway for all of the VLANs! So... the Meraki switches should be used as Layer3 switches with OSPF routing, as aggregation (each LACP with 2x 10G) to the access switches and as connection to servers (also using LACP with 2-4 10G)! Of course, the performance is an interesting topic here - but I only find the switching capacity in the datasheet (= https://meraki.cisco.com/product-collateral/ms400-series-datasheet/?file) - you may have more detailed information about routing capacity, interface buffer, etc.! This would be important for me to know, so I can evaluate if this is a good deployment idea from inter-vlan routing performance perspective as also micro-bursts may occur on the switchport interfaces and so on... 😕

thanks for any help!

[cmr]

@whistleblower if all the interfaces are the same speed then port buffers shouldn't matter.  The only time that the buffer size should come into the equation is when you have different speed ports talking to each other, or are saturating either inter-switch or stack links.  We have had several storage providers request large buffers to fix issues on iSCSI SANs and as yet the buffer size has NEVER ended up being the issue... 

We have been replacing Cisco 3850s with MS355s (stacked) and haven't noticed anything negative in terms of performance.  In theory every port in a switch should run close to wire speed, with the only obvious bottlenecks being stack or other inter-switch links.  Routing should not cause performance slow downs either in our experience, even on a L3 MS210 stack we have.

[PhilipDAth]

I concur with @cmr .  From memory, the MS425 uses a shared buffer system (so there are no buffers per port).

I've often used the MS425's as core switches, and they have always worked great.  I've found them very reliable.

[MarcP]

We recently replace old Cisco switches with MS425-32 as well.

There are connected several floor switches in LACP, all works fine so far. 

In our scenario they are just L2 as L3 is on the firewall.

[whistleblower]

@PhilipDAth ... regarding the ‘shared buffer‘ - do you maybe have some official documentations that you can share? I noticed that other technicians mean that there are port-buffer used!

[PhilipDAth]

There is no public documentation about the internal buffer allocation.