Catalyst 3550. Please advise

[touvue]

Can anyone please help clarify the difference between a 3550EMI and 3550SMI. To be more direct is what does EMI have over SMI. The only thing I found at Cisco site is that EMI has routed uplink capabilities. The way we want to deploy is to use one 3550EMI then the the rest of the switches are 3550SMI. Would that work?

[beckmanp]

The EMI allows for IP routing. Using one EMI switch and having the others as SMI would work and you could route between VLANs using the One EMI.

Hope that helps.

[mbettis]

Q. What features are only supported on the EMI?

A. The following features and functionality are only supported with the EMI:

Advanced IP routing protocols for load balancing and constructing scalable LANs:

OSPF

IGRP and EIGRP

BGPv4

WCCP to allow switch interaction with a cache for the purpose of redirecting content requests to a cache and performing basic load balancing across multiple caches

PIM for IP multicast routing within a network that enables the network to receive the multicast feed requested and for switches not participating in the multicast to be pruned—support for PIM sparse mode (PIM-SM), PIM dense mode (PIM-DM), and PIM sparse-dense mode

Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) tunneling for interconnecting two multicast-enabled networks across non multicast networks

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps646/products_qanda_item09186a00800913d3.shtml

[a.manosca]

Just to add, the EMI software also supports L3 switching, HSRP, and IGMP.

HTH.

[touvue]

Thanks greatly.