Friday, 20 March 2020

Difference between L2 SWITCH ,L3 SWITCH & ROUTER

Difference between LAYER 2 AND LAYER 3 SWITCH

Let's first talk about the major similarity between Layer 2 i.e L2 & Layer 3 i.e L3 Switch is that both of them work on Ethernet Technology.

A L2 switch does switching only.

Basically a L2 Switch  maintains a Layer 2 address table i.e MAC address table which includes list of mac addresses and there respective ports of the switch.

L2 Switch refers this MAC address table to switch the packets from a port to the destination port.



L2 SWITCH - 2960
Whereas ,

A L3 switch also does switching exactly like a L2 switch.

& addition to that a L3 switch is also capable of doing routing by refering L3 address table i.e IP Routing table.

For intra-VLAN communication, it uses the MAC address table. For inter-VLAN communication, it uses the IP routing table.

L3 SWITCH - CISCO 4500 SERIES SWITCH
Difference between LAYER 3 SWITCH & ROUTER

Let's first talk about similarity between L3 Switch and a Router - Both are capable of doing Routing .

Fast Switching is possible in L3 Switches and not for Routers.

In Layer3 Switches forwarding is hardware based - routing decisions are made by specialized ASIC.

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is a kind of integrated circuit that is specially built for only for one purpose of forwading Hence provides "fast switching"

whereas on Routers forwarding decision is centralized software based and hence fast switching is not possible.

Port density is more in L3 Switch as compared to Router.

ROUTER - CISCO ASR 1002 ROUTER


Routers are more expensive as compared to L3 Switches .The reason behind this would be that Router can perform routing on Multitechnology ports .

L3 Switches can perform routing only on Ethernet ports whereas a Router can perform routing on Ethernet , ISDN , Serial port.

Routers supports Edge technologies like NAT , IPSec , Tunneling , Firewall feature etc. which L3 Switch can't.

Routers provides MPLS and VPN services which L3 Switches can't.

Routers can handle relatively larger Routing Table as compared to L3 Switches.

Thanks For Reading !!!!

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