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Catalyst 2960 Switch SoftwareConfiguration Guide
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Chapter1 Overview
Features
Performance Features
•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 Mbps interfaces and on 10/100/1000 BASE-TX SFP module interface that enables the
interface to automatically detect the required cable connection type (straight-through or crossover)
and to configure the connection appropriately
•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)
•EtherChannel for enhanced fault tolerance and for providing up to 8 Gbps (Gigabit EtherCha nnel)
or 800 Mbps (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
•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
•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
•IGMP filtering for controlling the set of multicast groups to which hosts on a switch port can belong
•IGMP throttling for configuring the action when the maximum number of entries is in the IGMP
forwarding table
•IGMP configurable leave timer to configure the leave latency for the network.
•Switch Database Management (SDM) templates for allocating system resources to maximize
support for user-selected features
Management Options
•An embedded device manager—The device manager is a GUI that is integrated in the software
image. You use it to configure and to monitor a single switch. For information about launching the
device manager, see the getting started guide. For more information about the device manager, see the
switch online help.
•Network Assistant—Network Assistant is a network management application that can be
downloaded from Cisco.com. You use it to manage a single switch, a cluster of switch es, or a
community of devices. For more information about Network Assistant, see Getting Started with
Cisco Network Assistant, available on Cisco.com.