Benchmarking and Baseline a closet of 3548

[matthew.winer]

I am currently running Catalyst 3548XL in all my closets. They are all run at 10/half because the building a little old there is still a lot of CAT 3. Our art department has been approved to be upgraded to all CAT 6. So I would like to bump all the ports they are connected to, to 100/full. They are transferring large amounts of data at a time, as I am sure some of you know with an art department. However, I would like to prove that this costly change has been worth our while.

I was just wondering what the best utilities would be to check the performance of the switches. Once we cut over I also need to measure how much more work the 3548s are doing. I would like to check bandwidth, pipe utilization, processor utilization, etc, both before and after so that I can prove that this really did help us and also if I need to add a more powerful switch into the closet just for the art department.

The utils I have at my disposal are CiscoWorks 2000, and Sniffer. I was just hoping I could get some tips and places where I could look to get some good data to report on.

Sorry for the long post

Thank you for your help

Matthew Winer

[rmushtaq]

There's a good Best Practices White paper on Performance Management at: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/126/ which can also help you. For monitoring Utilization you can use Cisco View or nGenius RTM. Both comes with the CW2000 bundle and will give you real time data/graphs.

[msjouw]

Matthew,

Get yourself a copy of the free util called MRTG, this will allow you to graph all ports with 5 (adjustable) minute averages and it will keep a history for you also. We run this on router links and a number of our main switches. I.e. the switch that supports the internet and some other external connections gives us all info on line usage without getting this from the router that is outside the firewall. When you want to spend money another option is getting a toolset from Solarwinds, the professional plus has a advanced bandwidth util that will do the same.

Regards, Maarten Sjouw