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SonicPoint Deployment Best Practices
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SonicOS 5.8.1 Administrator Guide
• Because of this, make sure each port can get 10 Watts guaranteed if possible, and set the
PoE priority to critical or high.
• One thing to be particularly careful to plan for is that not all PoE switches can provide the
full 15.4 watts of power to each of its PoE ports – it might have 24 but it can’t actually have
all ports with PoE devices attached without the addition of an external redundant power
supply. You will need to work closely with the manufacturer of the PoE switch to ensure that
enough power is supplied to the switch to power all of your PoE devices.
Spanning-Tree
• When an Ethernet port becomes electrically active, most switches by default will activate
the spanning-tree protocol on the port to determine if there are loops in the network
topology. During this detection period of 50-60 seconds the port does not pass any traffic
– this feature is well-known to cause problems with SonicPoints. If you do not need
spanning-tree, disable it globally on the switch, or disable it on each port connected to a
SonicPoint device.
• If this is not possible, check with the switch manufacturer to determine if they allow for “fast
spanning-tree detection”, which is a method that runs spanning-tree in a shortened time so
as to not cause connectivity issues. Please refer to the switch-specific sections at the end
of this technote for programming samples on how to do this.
VTP and GVRP
Turn these trunking protocols off on ports connected directly to SonicPoints, as they have been
known to cause issues with SonicPoints – especially the high-end Cisco Catalyst series
switches.
Port-Aggregation
• Many switches have port aggregation turned on by default – this causes a lot of issues and
• should be deactivated on ports connected directly to SonicPoints.
• PAGP/Fast EtherChannel/EtherChannel – turn this off on the ports going to SonicPoints.
• LACP – turn this off on the ports going to SonicPoints.
Broadcast Throttling/Broadcast Storm
This feature is an issue on some switches, especially D-Link. Please disable on per port basis
if possible, if not disable globally.
Speed and Duplex
• At present, auto-negotiation of speed and duplex is the only option for SonicPoints.
• Lock speed and duplex on switch and reboot SonicPoint -- this may help with connectivity
issues.
• Check port for errors, as this is the best way to determine if there is a duplex issue (port will
also experience degraded throughput).