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You’ll be spending a LOT of time studying and it’s better to spend your time at switches than the NM16-SW module.

It’s not too expensive and using a real switch is better.įor the CCIE…do yourself a favor and invest in 2x 3560 and 2x 3550 and connect them to a breakout switch or get quad-nics. If you are studying for CCNP SWITCH just get yourself a 3550 and a 2950 or something. If you do have some money to spend get 2 or 3 Cisco 2950’s and you will have more fun. So what should you do? get real switches or use GNS3? If you have no budget and are studying for CCNA, just use GNS3. SPAN is excellent and I also like Storm Control and the Quality of Service commands. Etherchannel I don’t like since there’s no Lacp or Pagp support, the same for spanning-tree…you lack a lot of commands and there’s no way to switch to other modes like MST which you can do on a real switch. VTP is the same thing as on a real switch so no need for real hardware here. Trunking is fine, you can do everything that you want as long as you don’t care about ISL. If you want to play with vlans or vlan interfaces there’s nothing wrong using the NM16-SW module. So what do I think of it? To be honest I like it a bit better after researching all the commands and what the options are. Quality of Service (QOS): The switch commands for Qos are there like “mls qos” and you can configure the mls qos maps.Storm Control: Storm control is there and seems to be just fine.The commands are there so I believe it should work just fine. Switched Port Analyzer: Should be possible but to be honest I didn’t fully test it yet.To be honest you are better of with real switches to study spanning-tree if you ask me. Spanning-Tree: You can learn the basics of spanning-tree, see which ports are in blocking and forwarding mode but don’t expect any fancy stuff.Etherchannel: If you want to learn etherchannel you are better off with some real switches, you can enable it but there’s no Lacp or Pagp support.Vlan Trunking Protocol (VTP): VTP is working just like on a switch, you can configure the VTP domain, mode like server / client / transparent, pruning and passwords.There is no dynamic auto or dynamic desirable mode so now way to lab this. But you are able to setup a trunk connection just fine. Trunking: Trunking is looking good, the only encapsulation type is 802.1Q which is fine (no ISL).This is the same as you would do on any 元 switch like the 3550 or 3560. For example interface vlan 10 with IP address 10.10.10.10 and interface vlan 20 with IP address 20.20.20.20. Vlan interfaces: You can create vlan interfaces which can be used as the default gateway for clients.Now let’s see what “switching” options we have. This is a Cisco 3725 with the NM-16SW module so only the icon is different. You might have noticed that in the newer versions of GNS3 there’s a Etherswitch Router. Now you are probably wondering ‘which capabilities’ so let’s have a look what we can do. I’ve been getting questions about switches in GNS3 so decided to write this article explaining which switching protocols you can or cannot use in GNS3.įirst of all, it’s impossible to run switches in GNS3! That being said the option that we do have is using the NM-16SW switching module in a router which gives us some capabilities.