ES-2048 User’s Guide

CHAPTER 1

Getting to Know Your Switch

This chapter introduces the main features and applications of the switch.

1.1 Introduction

The ES-2048 is a stand-alone layer 2 Ethernet switch with 48 10/100Mbps ports, 2 dual personality interfaces for uplink as well as a console port and a management port for local management. A dual personality interface includes one Gigabit port and one slot for mini- GBIC transceiver (SFP module) with one port active at a time.

With its built-in web configurator, managing and configuring the switch is easy. In addition, the switch can also be managed via Telnet, any terminal emulator program on the console port, or third-party SNMP management.

1.2 Software Features

This section describes the general software features of the switch.

DHCP Client

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol RFC 2131 and RFC 2132) allows individual computers to obtain TCP/IP configuration at start-up from a server. You can configure the switch as a DHCP client to obtain TCP/IP information (such as the IP address and subnet mask) from a DHCP server. If you disable the DHCP service, you must manually enter the TCP/IP information.

VLAN

A VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) allows a physical network to be partitioned into multiple logical networks. Devices on a logical network belong to one group. A device can belong to more than one group. With VLAN, a device cannot directly talk to or hear from devices that are not in the same group(s); the traffic must first go through a router.

Queuing

Queuing is used to help solve performance degradation when there is network congestion. Three scheduling services are supported: Strict Priority Queuing (SPQ), Weighted Round Robin (WRR) and Weighted Fair Schedule (WFS). This allows the switch to maintain separate queues for packets from each individual source or flow and prevent a source from monopolizing the bandwidth.

Chapter 1 Getting to Know Your Switch

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