Thread: Jumbo Frames
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Old 15th March 2009
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ai-danno ai-danno is offline
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First off, when an Irishman wishes you Happy St. Patrick's Day, that's just really really cool (to an Irish-American such as myself, anyway.) So Happy St. Patrick's Day to you, as well!

On your jumbo frame issue, it seems as though you understand a salient point that bears mentioning for anyone else referencing this thread- all devices in your network that intend on taking advantage of jumbo frames of any size will need to all match the same size together. So in this example, if one device supports 7K sized frames, all devices in the network should appropriately be set to 7K as well, or frames they transmit to that particular host will eventually will become fragmented, hurting performance.

The only way around this 'lowest-common denominator' approach for flexible MTU based on host is through the use of VLAN's. Each VLAN can have it's own configured MTU, instead of relying on a single MTU used by all in the network. This extends the complexity of your underlying network setup, though, and necessitates a connecting switch capable of VLAN Trunks (not the ether-channel-style trunking (aka, bonding)) so that each switch port can transmit on multiple VLANs simultaneously.
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