6506 >>performance >switchport trunk with SVIs OR no switchport with subint

[mstyszynski]

Dear collegues ,

this might be a simple case for most of you :) we got a simple connection of 6506--gig--12k and the concern is about interfaces of 6506 that could be switchported with trunk dot1q and then declared on L3 with SVIs(with vrf forwarding also) or maybe we had better set it with subinterfaces and dot1q tags. It comes to the same in general but do you know what is the difference in performances of traffic flow inside 6506 when acting as no swithport under phisical interfaces ? If you got a nice url that explain clearly the difference of the performance when the port acts on pure L3 and when it's with L2 trunk and SVIs, it would be great!Thanks in advance.

best regards

Michal

[Roberto Salazar]

Eventhough the Cat6K can do sub-interface it is recommended to use trunk through switchport, this way you will not run into exhausting the vlans. when you use a vlan on sub-interface you cannot use that same vlan for the switchport for hosts. Other than that performance is the same.

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat6000/122sx/swcg/layer3.htm#wp1040486

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[bigchoice75 · Accepted solution]

The flow will be the same whether it's an L3 or L2 port, all traffic will be compared against the FIB and checked for adjacencies...if an adjacency exists the packet will be hardware switched to the destination otherwise it is sent to the L3 routing engine.