Note:

• The full product specifications below are from the manufacturer and may contain information related to other package quantities that will not apply to the product that you are reviewing. Please confirm the actual content and/or package quantity from the main product specifications page.
• These specifications may represent the entire product series/model/line to which this product belongs with specific configuration differences between the individual products stated.
• These specifications may have been copied from the same product in other region/country in which case there might be minor differences in region-specific data such as Input Voltage, Terms of Warranty etc.

Features and specifications

Note: Features and specifications listed in this section are based on Networking OS 8.2.

The RackSwitch G8296 has the following features and specifications:

• Form factor: 2U rack mount switch
  • RackSwitch G8296 Rear-to-Front version for ports located in the rear of the rack matching System x®, ThinkServer®, BladeCenter® and Flex System® designs
  • RackSwitch G8296 Front-to-Rear version for ports located in the front of the rack matching airflow of NeXtScale System designs
• Ports
  • 86 ports for 1 Gb or 10 Gb Ethernet SFP/SFP+ transceivers (support for 1000BASE-SX, 1000BASE-LX, 1000BASE-T, 10GBASE-SR, 10GBASE-LR, or 10GBASE-ER) or SFP+ direct-attach copper cables. SFP+ modules and DAC cables are not included and must be purchased separately (see Table 3).
  • 8 ports for 40 Gb Ethernet QSFP+ transceivers or QSFP+ to QSFP+ DAC cables. QSFP+ modules and DAC cables are not included and must be purchased separately (see Table 3).
  • 2 ports for 40 Gb Ethernet QSFP+ transceivers, QSFP+ to QSFP+ DAC cables, QSFP+ to 4x 10 Gb SFP+ breakout cables, or MTP to 4x 10 Gb LC optical breakout cables (require a supported QSFP+ transceiver). QSFP+ modules and DAC cables are not included and must be purchased separately (see Table 3).
  • One 10/100/1000 Ethernet port (RJ-45 connector) for out of band (OOB) management
  • One RS-232 serial port (mini-USB connector) that provides an additional means to configure the switch
  • One USB port for mass storage devices
• Scalability and performance
  • 1 Gb, 10 Gb, and 40 Gb Ethernet ports for bandwidth optimization and performance
  • Up to 94x 10 Gb Ethernet SFP+ connections (with optional breakout cables)
  • Up to 10x 40 Gb Ethernet QSFP+ connections
  • Non-blocking architecture with wire-speed forwarding of traffic and aggregated throughput of 2.56 Tbps
  • Full line-rate throughput with less than 0.6 microseconds switching latency
  • Media access control (MAC) address learning: automatic update, support for up to 224,000 MAC addresses
  • Up to 126 IP interfaces per switch
  • Static and LACP (IEEE 802.3ad) link aggregation, up to 72 trunk groups with up to 16 ports per trunk group
  • Support for jumbo frames (up to 9,216 bytes)
  • Broadcast/multicast storm control
  • IGMP snooping to limit flooding of IP multicast traffic
  • IGMP filtering to control multicast traffic for hosts participating in multicast groups
  • Configurable traffic distribution schemes over trunk links based on source/destination IP or MAC addresses, or both
  • Fast port forwarding and fast uplink convergence for rapid STP convergence
• Availability and redundancy
  • Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) for Layer 3 router redundancy
  • IEEE 802.1D STP for providing L2 redundancy
  • IEEE 802.1s Multiple STP (MSTP) for topology optimization, up to 32 STP instances are supported by a single switch
  • IEEE 802.1w Rapid STP (RSTP) provides rapid STP convergence for critical delay-sensitive traffic like voice or video
  • Per-VLAN Rapid STP (PVRST) enhancements
  • Layer 2 Trunk Failover to support active/standby configurations of network adapter teaming on compute nodes
  • Hot Links provides basic link redundancy with fast recovery for network topologies that require Spanning Tree to be turned off
• VLAN support
  • Up to 4095 VLANs supported per switch, with VLAN numbers ranging from 1 to 4095 (VLAN 4095 is used by the management network.)
  • Port-based and protocol-based VLANs
  • 802.1Q VLAN tagging support
  • Ingress VLAN tagging support to tunnel packets through a public domain without altering the original 802.1Q tagging information
  • Private VLANs support as defined in RFC 5517
• Security
  • VLAN-based, MAC-based, and IP-based access control lists (ACLs)
  • 802.1x port-based authentication
  • Multiple user IDs and passwords
  • User access control
  • Radius, TACACS+ and LDAP authentication and authorization
  • NIST 800-131A Encryption
  • Selectable encryption protocol
• Quality of Service (QoS)
  • Support for IEEE 802.1p, IP ToS/DSCP, and ACL-based (MAC/IP source and destination addresses, VLANs) traffic classification and processing
  • Traffic shaping and re-marking based on defined policies
  • Eight output Class of Service (COS) queues per port for processing qualified traffic
  • Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to help avoid congestion
  • IPv4/IPv6 ACL metering
• IP v4 Layer 3 functions
  • Host management
  • IP forwarding
  • Network Address Translation (NAT)
  • IP filtering with ACLs, up to 256 IPv4 ACLs supported
  • VRRP for router redundancy
  • Support for up to 128 static routes
  • Routing protocol support (RIP v1, RIP v2, OSPF v2, BGP)
  • Support for policy-based routing (PBR)
  • Support for DHCP Relay
  • Support for IGMP snooping and IGMP relay
  • Support for Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) in Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) and Dense Mode (PIM-DM).
• IPv6 Layer 3 functions
  • IPv6 host management
  • IPv6 forwarding
  • Up to 128 static routes
  • Support for OSPF v3 routing protocol
  • IPv6 filtering with ACLs, up to 128 IPv6 ACLs supported
• OpenFlow 1.0 and 1.3.1 support
• Virtualization
  • Unified Fabric Port (UFP)
    • Ethernet and storage (NAS, iSCSI, and FCoE) traffic is supported on UFP virtual ports (vPorts)
    • Supports up to 1024 VLAN for the virtual ports
    • Supports either VMready or 802.1Qbg Edge Virtual Bridging (not both) on the same physical port
    • Integration with L2 Failover
  • Virtual link aggregation groups (vLAGs)
  • 802.1Qbg Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB) is an emerging IEEE standard for allowing networks to become virtual machine (VM)-aware.
    • Virtual Ethernet Bridging (VEB) and Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) are mechanisms for switching between VMs on the same hypervisor.
    • Edge Control Protocol (ECP) is a transport protocol that operates between two peers over an IEEE 802 LAN providing reliable, in-order delivery of upper layer protocol data units.
    • Virtual Station Interface (VSI) Discovery and Configuration Protocol (VDP) allows centralized configuration of network policies that will persist with the VM, independent of its location.
    • EVB Type-Length-Value (TLV) is used to discover and configure VEPA, ECP, and VDP.
  • VMready support
    • Up to 4,096 virtual entities (VEs)
    • Automatic VE discovery
    • Up to 4,093 local or distributed VM groups for VEs
    • Lenovo NMotion™ feature for automatic network configuration migration
• Converged Enhanced Ethernet
  • Priority-Based Flow Control (PFC) (IEEE 802.1Qbb) extends 802.3x standard flow control to allow the switch to pause traffic based on the 802.1p priority value in each packet’s VLAN tag.
  • Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) (IEEE 802.1Qaz) provides a method for allocating link bandwidth based on the 802.1p priority value in each packet’s VLAN tag.
  • Data Center Bridging Capability Exchange Protocol (DCBX) (IEEE 802.1AB) allows neighboring network devices to exchange information about their capabilities.
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
  • FC-BB5 FCoE specification compliant
  • FCoE transit switch operations
  • FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) support for automatic ACL configuration
  • FCoE Link Aggregation Group (LAG) support
  • Supports 2,048 FCoE sessions with FIP Snooping by using Class ID ACLs
• Manageability
  • Industry-standard command line interface (isCLI)
  • Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP V1, V2 and V3)
  • HTTP/HTTPS browser GUI
  • Telnet interface for CLI
  • Secure Shell (SSH) v1 and v2 for CLI
  • Secure Copy (SCP) for uploading and downloading the switch configuration via secure channels
  • Service Location Protocol (SLP)
  • Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) for discovering network devices
  • Serial interface for CLI
  • Scriptable CLI
  • Dual software images
  • Firmware image update via TFTP, FTP, and Secure FTP (sFTP)
  • Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Precision Time Protocol (PTP) for switch clock synchronization
  • Switch Center management application
• Monitoring
  • Switch LEDs for port status and switch status indication
  • Remote Monitoring (RMON) agent to collect statistics and proactively monitor switch performance
  • Port mirroring for analyzing network traffic passing through switch
  • Change tracking and remote logging with syslog feature
  • Support for sFLOW agent for monitoring traffic in data networks (separate sFLOW analyzer required elsewhere)