Difference between a normal Cisco Switch and a Catalyst
Heyy guys!!!
You might have heard the name Catalyst Switch or L-3 Switches and you might have a lot of confusion regarding it.
so today we will discuss about the difference between a normal Cisco Switch and a Catalyst Switch.
Catalyst is the brand-name of Cisco’s most popular series of switches. When someone says they’re using a “Catalyst switch”, it just means that they’re working with a Cisco switch.
Other companies have names for their L-3 switches, like HP’s ProCurve or Dell’s PowerConnect.
A Layer 2 switch (L-2) does switching only. This means that it uses MAC addresses to switch the packets from a port to the destination port (and only the destination port).
It therefore maintains a MAC address table so that it can remember which ports have which MAC address associated.
A L3 switch also does switching exactly like a L2 switch. The L3 means that it has an identity from the L3 layer.
Practically this means that a L3 switch is capable of having IP addresses and doing routing. For intra-VLAN communication, it uses the MAC address table. For inter-VLAN communication, it uses the IP routing table.
You may think that a Layer 2 Switch (like Cisco 2960 series switch) has VLAN (can setup VLANs) and we can associate IP address to it but that VLAN interface cannot be used for the routing purposes as a L-2 switch doesn’t maintains IP routing table.
Hope this would clear the things.
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