Introduction
Switch ports are physical interfaces (typically on the front-panel of the device) that are associated with the switch forwarding engine(s) (that is, the forwarding ASICs). They can carry Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic for data plane and control plane/management purposes.
NetVisor OS offers numerous techniques to manage and monitor the traffic that traverses switch ports. These features include port statistics, port storm control, port buffering, Class of Service (CoS), Forward Error Correction (FEC), jumbo frame support, port link status detection, and others. Below are the major features discussed in this chapter:
Port Statistics: Provide useful information such as the number of incoming and outgoing packets (unicast, multicast, or broadcast), discarded or dropped packets, and errors.
Port Speed Configuration: Enables you to configure switch ports with different speed values up to 100 Gbps (depending on the transceiver type).
Port Storm Control: This feature limits the percentage of the total available port bandwidth that can be used by broadcast, multicast, or flooded unicast traffic. It can be enabled to prevent excessive flooded traffic from degrading network performance.
Configuring Port Link Status Detection: Enables you to configure port link status detection checks on Arista switches.
Port Buffering: Allocates storage space for packets that cannot be immediately forwarded on a port.
Class of Service-based Queuing: Lets you segregate traffic into different queues based on Class of Service priority.
Forward Error Correction: A technique to detect and correct a limited number of errors in the transmitted data without the need for re-transmission.
Static Pre-emphasis: Static pre-emphasis settings help shape the outputs of ports into a well-defined, clean signal.
Link Scan Mode: The Link Scan feature detects physical link state changes. You can configure interrupt-based detection as an alternative to the software-based link scan process.
Jumbo Frame Support: Enables ports to accept and forward jumbo frames (frames with an MTU size greater than 1500 bytes)