System Overview and Topology #
Current Generation Ethernet Switches #
Cisco Catalyst 9200x/9300x Series #
- Click here for more information on the C9200 Series Switches – Recommended as a core or edge switch
- Click here for more information on the C9300 Series Switches – Recommended as a core or edge switch
Cisco Catalyst C1000 Series Switches #
Click here for more information on the C1000 Series Switches – Recommended as a core or edge switch.
Note: The C1000 has a limit of 1024 IPv4 Multicast Routes and IGMP groups. This effectively limits the number of multicast streams (every source in the system is a multicast stream) connected at the same time. When planning a system keep this in mind. The C1000 is ideal for smaller systems, but in a large WNIP system you can approach and exceed this limit.
Why is there a limit? The Ethernet switch uses IGMP to manage multicast streams; each source and mix bus is a multicast stream that can be connected to destinations. As a simplified explanation, the switch builds a table of all of the connected streams in use at the time so it can allow the streams to travel to the ports that have requested them but not to the ports that aren’t using those sources. The C1000 only has enough memory to store a table of 1024 addresses. When planning your system, if you anticipate your system will ultimately grow large enough where this would be a problem, choose a more robust switch.
Netgear M4250 AV Series Switches #
Netgear’s M4250 AV series is a line of Ethernet switches designed for Audio/Video over IP and targeted at the broadcast and sound contracting markets.
Netgear designed this switch to be easy to deploy in the field, but to accomplish that they created a proprietary implementation of IGMP, which is the protocol used in AoIP to manage multicast traffic. WheatNet-IP is based on multicast.
As a result, this switch is best deployed with other switches from the same Netgear AV Series. If you are adding one of these to an existing Cisco installation, you will need to manually set up trunk ports on the Netgear, disable the proprietary IGMP features, and manually turn other features on for the Netgear switch to follow IGMP standards to interact with Cisco and other manufacturers.
This guide steps you through the entire process, whether you are using this in a Netgear environment or a mixed Netgear/Cisco environment.
Older Generation Compatible Switches #
These models are considered End-Of-Life by their manufacturer.