I found that I could follow the menus and use a little bit of trial and error to configure most of these three switches' options. Some of the advanced Layer 3 options on the 3Com switch forced me to use the manual a few times, but the vendors did a good job making their text- and Web-based interfaces intuitive and easy to use. The only glitch I ran into was a mysterious memory leak that caused poor performance on the host PC I used to manage the Dell switch. Dell, like the other vendors, uses JavaScript in its Web interface, but it's the only vendor that doesn't require you to install Sun Microsystems' Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Thus, my problems might have been related to Microsoft's JVM.
An added bonus with the 3Com switch is its Network Supervisor management software. This application, which 3Com provides at no additional charge, offers a range of features that might appeal to smaller organizations that don't have a network-management application. Network Supervisor can perform network discovery, monitoring, and alerting and reporting functions, as well as let you centrally manage and upgrade 3Com switches.
HP's switch was easy to set up and offers hot-swappable modules. As is characteristic of a chassis solution, Switch 4108GL has a great deal of flexibility to accommodate the rapidly changing needs of many businesses. You could, for example, choose to populate the majority of slots with 6-port 1000Base-T modules for an aggregation switch. HP also offers a stacking module that lets you daisy-chain its switches if you need more capacity.
As I mentioned, setting up the Cisco Gigabit Ethernet switch was a bit more complicated. When I tried to just plug in the switch and plug in my hosts, the switch didn't respond. Cisco includes documentation on the CD-ROM that comes with the switch, but Cisco's document reader wouldn't install, so I couldn't read the nonstandard document formats. Thus, I was forced to download the manuals in PDF format from the Cisco Web site. I've always appreciated Cisco's excellent Web-based support and thorough documentation, but I had to invest a few hours in the 700-page manual and the IOS command line before I had the switch configured and running correctly. Ultimately, setting up the switch was similar to setting up a Cisco router, which makes perfect sense when you consider that that's what a Layer 3 switch really is. Yet, I felt that Cisco could have made the initial setup easier.
After I had the switch running, I used Cisco's Web-based Cluster Management Suite (CMS) for further configuration. CMS lets you manage clusters of as many as 16 Cisco switches as one IP address. The Web interface was fairly intuitive and was well suited for several tasks, such as setting up VLANs and QoS prioritization. That being said, the IOS command line is still the best interface for configuring the many detailed options that make the Catalyst 3550-12T both powerful and flexible. Besides, most of the documentation is dedicated to performing tasks from the command line, whereas only one chapter of the manual describes using CMS.
The four vendors' Gigabit Ethernet switches have similar management capabilities. All of them provide firmware upgrades through Trivial FTP (TFTP)—something I had to test immediately on the 3Com switch to upgrade it for Layer 3 capability. All the switches provide SNMP agents and support similar sets of MIB extensions for SNMP-based management applications and Remote Monitoring (RMON). In addition, the switches provide the ability to monitor switch activity through Web clients or even with bundled network-management software, such as 3Com's Network Supervisor. Unless you're running a small network, however, you'll likely be using some form of network-management application that supports SNMP; all four switches are well suited to SNMP-based management and monitoring.
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