sundance-communications.com/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Networking load balancing switches vs normal switches? what the difference?

Can anyone tell me exactly why I would need a load balancing switch vs a regular switch.

My company hired a new hardware guy who wants to change all our current switches(which work fine) with load balancing switches.

How do you know if you actually need this equipment or not?

Thanks.

Makes no sense if they have no issues. But here is the skinny:

https://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/4.html

Hi.

This guy also wants layer 4-7 switches instead of the normal 2/3 switches.

This guy comes in 1 day and wants to buy the most expensive equipment he can fine but he does not give any reason.

Was his last job working for the government?

Unless you're dealing with a fairly large enterprise network, this is all overkill.

"This guy comes in 1 day and wants to buy the most expensive equipment he can fine but he does not give any reason."

Make him justify it, I would.

First of all, why are you so concerned?

It sounds as if this is out of your league anyway. If your job are the phones then stick with the phones. You sound bitter, it certainly isnt your money... NO.

In my company it would come out of my pocket as well as the companies as we have profit sharing.

Just put trust in your upper management and wait him/her out . He won't last long !

It's really hard to say whether your company would benefit from his suggestion. You have not provided any description of your current network setup, usage, bandwith requirements etc.

Let me give you a brief synopsis. A standard L2 switch can not natively do load balancing. If you want to mess with the spanning tree parameters you can manipulate path selection. A multilayer switch can do load balancing and it usually occurs at L3. The bottom line is if you are running static routes in your network and you have multiple paths to a destination, if the paths have equal Administrative distance the paths will load balance (round-robin). Their is a bit of "trickery" you have to do to make this work. It depends on what type of switiching you are using. If you are interested I would be glad to give you further info.