switch torture test

[gzorn]

I managed to get an ebay deal on a Netgear S3300-28X (knock on wood - arrives Tuesday). Before pressing it into service, I would like to give it a torture test to make sure it's fully functional.

Any advice on exercising a switch to the max? Right now, my plan is it hook up 2 servers on SFP+, and all of my clients/laptops 1gbase-T, and run simultaneous iperf in tcp, then udp and just pound it with data.

Any other recommended network loads?
Thanks!

 

[pricklypunter]

Might be easier to configure a couple of layer loops instead and observe how it copes with them, if you can of course, I'm not familiar with those switches

 

[azev]

the best way to test a switch is to perform a snake test

 

[gzorn]

the best way to test a switch is to perform a snake test

Thanks, Azev. That was news to me. It's a little funky on a switch with 10G and 1G ports, but I can run independent snake tests on the 10G and 1G sections.

 

[azev]

yeah its a little harder to test different port speed unfortunately, but like you said testing them separately should work just fine.
Let us know the result when you are done, I am curious whether netgear switches can really run line rate
Use open source load generator software like ostinato to test different packet size, you will be surprised with the results.

 

[gzorn]

Let us know the result when you are done, I am curious whether netgear switches can really run line rate
Use open source load generator software like ostinato to test different packet size, you will be surprised with the results.

It took a bit to figure out the port-based vlan setup, but I got it. Finally figured out that I needed to disable STP in order for the Base-T loopback to work.
I just used iperf to generate some traffic and the switch didn't come close to breaking a sweat. CPU never got above 15% and I think that was from generating the web-frontend. When I dropped the MTU to 500, the transmission rate dropped to 8.3Gbps, but that might be my ethernet cards in the machines rather than the switch. Not to mention MTU mismatch between the switch and the cards.

I think I got 1 packet receive error on the switch with a couple terabytes transmitted.
I'll try routing another day.