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Catalyst 2960 and 2960-S Switch Software Configuration Guide
OL-8603-09
Chapter 1 Overview
Features
Performance Features
• Cisco EnergyWise manages the energy usage of end points including power over Ethernet (PoE)
devices and non-Cisco devices. For information, see the Cisco EnergyWise Configuration Guide.
• Autosensing of port speed and autonegotiation of duplex mode on all switch ports for optimizing
bandwidth.
• Automatic-medium-dependent interface crossover (auto-MDIX) capability on 10/100 and
10/100/1000 Mb/s interfaces and on 10/100/1000 BASE-TX SFP module interfaces that enables the
interface to automatically detect the required cable connection type (straight-through or crossover)
and to configure the connection appropriately.
• SFP+ support for 10Gigabit speeds (Catalyst 2960-S only)
• Support for up to 9000 bytes for frames that are bridged in hardware and up to 2000 bytes for frames
that are bridged by software
• IEEE 802.3x flow control on all ports (the switch does not send pause frames).
• Up to 20 Gb/s of forwarding rates in a Catalyst 2960-S switch stac k.
• EtherChannel for enhanced fault tolerance and for pr oviding up to 8 Gb/s (Gigabit EtherChannel)
or 800 Mb/s (Fast EtherChannel) full-duplex bandwidth among switches, routers, and servers.
• Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) and Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) for automatic
creation of EtherChannel links.
• Forwarding of Layer 2 packets at Gigabit line rate across the switches in the stack.
• Forwarding of Layer 2 packets at Gigabit line rate
• Per-port storm control for preventing broadcast, multicast, and unicast storms.
• Port blocking on forwarding unknown Layer 2 unknown unicast, multicast, and bridged broadcast
traffic.
• Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping for IGMP Versions 1, 2, and 3 for
efficiently forwarding multimedia and multicast traffic
• IGMP report suppression for sending only one IGMP report per multicast router query to the
multicast devices (supported only for IGMPv1 or IGMPv2 queries).
• IGMP snooping querier support to configure switch to generate pe riodic IGMP general query
messages.
• IPv6 host support for basic IPv6 management
• Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) snooping to enable efficient distribution of IP version 6 (IPv6)
multicast data to clients and routers in a switched network
Note To use IPv6 features, the switch must be running the LAN Base image.
• Multicast VLAN registration (MVR) to continuously send multicast streams in a multicast VLAN
while isolating the streams from subscriber VLANs for bandwidth and security reasons.
Note To use MVR, the switch must be running the LAN Base image.
• IGMP filtering for controlling the set of multicast groups to which hosts on a switch port can belong.