The huge chassis can take up to 8 modules with up to 8 x 48 ports 10/100 Mbit/s. The 4800 switchfabric-mainboards have installed both busses on the backplane to transport up to 20 Gigabit/s of internal data transfer. However, the 4800 modules are not interchangeble with the 2400 modules.

In the lower part of the 4800 chassis there is a "Lucent Power System" chassis with 4 power modules, the experts say rectifiers. The power suply cage has two 120/230 Volt main plugs for redundant operation on two Unint.PowerSupplies.

Each of the 8 ESX-4800 switch modules are independantly working, if power is supplied. There is no main fabric like the most competitors have. So the 4800 ist totally redundant.
The data bus on the backplane is designed for 2 x 10 Gigabit/s and the hardware is designed for up to 36 giga packets per second (pps). This is an enormous switching power.

We will link to a power "Data transmission test", that has been done in 1999, to check some competitors by their markting papers and the real truth. There was a test environment, simulating a number of workstations close to running at the limits.

Within this test the ESX-4800 has moved 18 million packets per second, which was really impressive and the allmost best in this test. There has been a loss 10 packets out of 46 million 1518 byte packets. There was a 46 Gigabit stream with over 68 million 64 byte packet/sec based on layer 4 TCP traffic. The tester said, that this was really impressive.

The only disadvantage was, the the Fore NSC II management station did not recognize the 3 lost packets, but the the test monitor equipment did. Other competitors had hundreds of lost packets with much less throughput. As you know, the TCP/IP system does a final check retrieving the transmitted data again and again as long as everything is complete.