Saturday, February 27, 2010

Configuring Dell switches

The following commands configure a Dell PowerConnect 8000 series switch (10.0.0.250), sampling packets at 1-in-512, polling counters every 30 seconds and sending sFlow to an analyzer (10.0.0.50) over UDP using the default sFlow port (6343):

sflow 1 destination 10.0.0.50 owner 1 timeout 4294967295
sflow 1 polling ethernet 1/g1-1/g10 30
sflow 1 sampling ethernet 1/g1-1/g10 512

A previous posting discussed the selection of sampling rates. Additional information can be found on the Dell web site.

See Trying out sFlow for suggestions on getting started with sFlow monitoring and reporting.
Posted by Peter at 10:26 AM
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2 comments:

  1. This syntax didn't quite work for me - I'm using firmware 3.1.5.2 on the M6220 powerconnect switches. These are blade switches for the M1000E Chassis.

    What worked for me was

    sflow 1 destination
    sflow 1 destination owner timeout 4294967295
    sflow 1 polling ethernet 1/g1-1/g16 30
    sflow 1 polling ethernet 2/g1-2/g16 30
    sflow 1 sampling ethernet 1/g1-1/g16 1024
    sflow 1 sampling ethernet 2/g1-2/g16 1024

    Notice that the sflow destination ip and the owner lines needed to be separate. Also, with the version I'm running, 1024 was the smallest sample size it would allow.

    Another btw, if you run a stack on two powerconnects, the switch has 40 interfaces (interfaces 1/1 - 1/16 for eth0 of each blade, 2/1 - 2/16 for eth1, and then 1/17-1/20 and 2/17-2/20 for uplinks). However, there seems to be a sampling limit on the firmware that only allows 32, so that's why I did 1/g1-1/g16 in the command above instead of 1/g1-1/g20.

    Also, if you happen to use rancid to manage your dell configs, you will need to modify it to ignore the timeout, as it descreases all the time, so rancid sees it as a config change and will alert every time.

    that change goes into "drancid" file in the WriteTerm sub, like so

    # ignore sflow countdown timer
    if (/(sflow\s+\d+.*timeout)/) {
    ProcessHistory("","","","$1 4294967295\n"); next;
    }

    One other last caveat - there seems to be a bug with the switch not persisting polling and sampling configs after a reboot (I have an open case with Dell on it), so be aware that you may need to re-apply the polling/sampling lines above to get it to work again. It might be specific to stacked switches.

    Hope this helps!
    ReplyDelete
  2. also the mandatory timeout is a bitch anyhow, next thing they will include a counter that will reset to factory default or something ;-)

    My RANCID was also spammed with changes until I noticed
    ReplyDelete

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