Dell Force10 S4810 Restoration, Configuration, & Installation

[Windows7ge]

5 minutes ago, patfonltt said:

The good news is, it seems (based on your experience) the S4810 will tolerate use of a non-Dell branded module.

I'm glad that turned out to be the case. I don't see a reason it wouldn't work unless Dell wanted to deliberately force you to use their modules.

 

7 minutes ago, patfonltt said:

Not to be overly pedantic, but I believe the FiberStore modules with the "CO" designation are IBM BNT 46C3447 Compatible whereas the Cisco Compatible modules have no designator.  And the Dell Compatible modules have a "DE" designation.

I cannot comment on this. I bought these over a period of years. Fiberstore changed their module design & labeling no less than three times. My guess would be CO is their abbreviation for CISCO and the wildcard * might mean full compatibility. Ie for any CISCO equipment.

 

It's a fairly safe bet using CISCO firmware modules that they will have compatibility with other vendors such as Dell, Mellanox, Intel, Ubiquiti, Broadcom (equipment I've tested them on) as many vendors like to copy what CISCO does and have compatibility with their equipment.

[RollinLower]

4 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I am still using this switch. I hope and plan to for long into the future.

 

SFP+ 10Gig Short Range 850nm 300m w/ CISCO firmware from fiberstore.

 

Interesting, we have some dell 4048's in production that definitely refuse cisco optics. I wonder why

[Windows7ge]

5 hours ago, RollinLower said:

Interesting, we have some dell 4048's in production that definitely refuse cisco optics. I wonder why

Maybe FS has effectively been rolling out bypass hacked optics.

 

Without going to the used market it's hard to pass up $20/pop. Used to be $16.

 

My next best guess would be I know the whole OS runs off a SD card. Maybe there's a version you can install that allows broader compatibility and I just happened to get lucky.

[hmmurdock]

On 4/27/2022 at 1:57 PM, Windows7ge said:

I'm not home at the moment but I wanted to get some configuration out of the way and I'm glad I did because it gave me issues I didn't expect forcing me to change how I setup the VLANs.

 

This is the current arrangement which I hope can stay this way:

Switch-S4810P#show vlan
    NUM    Status    Description                     Q Ports
*   1      Inactive  Default VLAN                    U Fo 0/56
    2      Inactive  Primary VLAN                    T Te 0/12-47
                                                     T Fo 0/52
    3      Active    iPXE Node VLAN                  T Te 0/0-11
                                                     T Fo 0/60

Few things I discovered.

1. I'm honestly not sure if it makes a difference in my configuration but in addition to assigning ports to VLANs the ports must also be tagged to the VLAN (denoted by the letter T next to the ports.
2. Ports cannot be tagged to the Default VLAN (VLAN1)

So to start how I did what's shown above I created VLAN's 2 & 3 using the interface vlan # command in configuration mode:

Switch-S4810P(conf)#interface vlan 2
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#

If the VLAN does not exist this creates it while simultaneously taking you into it's configurator. From here I can tag/assign ports and give it a little description:

Switch-S4810P(conf)#interface vlan 2
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#tagged tengigabitethernet 0/12-47
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#tagged fortyGigE 0/52
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#description Primary VLAN

Switch-S4810P(conf)#interface vlan 3
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-3)#tagged tengigabitethernet 0/0-11
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#tagged fortyGigE 0/60
Switch-S4810P(conf-if-vl-2)#description iPXE Node VLAN

 

There is a little bit more to the setup than this but I don't expect anyone to be repeating what I did here so some details have been left out. For example all applicable ports have to be in switchport mode before you can do...pretty much any of the things I mentioned above.

 

And last but not least never forget:

Switch-S4810P#copy running-config startup-config 
File with same name already exist. 
Proceed to copy the file [confirm yes/no]: yes
!
5692 bytes successfully copied

It's the equivalent of Ctrl+S or File -> Save. If you forget to do this every time you make a change you'll lose everything you did since the last save if the power goes out.

 

When I get home I'll test and make sure tagging all the ports didn't break anything and connect the second 40GbE cable for the other VLAN. I can make sure the switch is doing it's job of segregating frames based on VLAN given one of the servers running on one VLAN is hosting DHCP. If clients on a different VLAN get an IP then I'll know the switch isn't configured how I need it.

Can't thank you enough for this post.  It was the last missing piece to get my switch up and running. I picked one of these up on eBay for next to nothing, but couldn't figure out the proper syntax to get the interfaces enabled.  It actually worked out well as I ended up grabbing a Mellanox SX-3036 (36x40Gbe) that let me have a 40Gbe connection for most of my servers and VMs, and it let me connect my blade servers that had 40Gb infiniband.  But now I can consolidate a few switches and tidy up the rack a bit.