We ran the RFC 2889 wizard on three ports, and then manually repeated the test on 48 switch ports. In all test iterations, Spirent TestCenter's MAC address aging timer is set to twice that of the switch under test. This wizard conducts a binary search to find the largest number of MAC addresses a switch can learn without flooding. To measure MAC address capacity, we used the RFC 2889 wizard in Spirent TestCenter. Also as recommended in RFC 2544, we measured latency at the throughput rate.
We offered fully meshed traffic on all 48 gigabit Ethernet ports.Īll tests involved the seven standard Ethernet frame lengths recommended in RFC 2544 - 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 1,280, and 1,518 bytes - and the test duration was 60 seconds in all cases. Initially, we used a four-port fully meshed pattern for the 10-gigabit Ethernet ports, but later scaled that back to a port-pair pattern. In the throughput/latency tests, we used separate traffic patterns for gigabit and 10-gigabit Ethernet ports. We also determined unicast MAC address capacity.
To evaluate device performance, we used the Spirent TestCenter traffic generator/analyzer to run the industry-standard benchmarks described in RFCs 2544, 2889, and 3918.įor unicast traffic, we assessed the switch in terms of throughput and latency by offering traffic on all ports at line rate. We tested the Huawei switch for performance, features, usability, power consumption, and security. This is a decent, workmanlike effort - but for Huawei to succeed in North American networking it will need to bring some sizzle along with the steak.
#Spirent ethernet testing rfc software
On the other hand, there's no true standout feature of the switch, and there were places where we wished the software were more polished.