Cisco 6509 switch with four line cards and dual supervisors

Cisco 4500 Supervisor Engines Compatibility
Cisco Supervisor Engine
Cisco 6500 Supervisor
Cisco 6500 Specs

The Catalyst 6500 is a modular chassisnetwork switch manufactured by Cisco Systems since 1999, capable of delivering speeds of up to '400 million packets per second'.^[1]

Hi All, I have one Cisco 6509-E switch with WS-SUP32-GE-3B supervisor engine. Now i want to upgrade my supervisor engine with VS-S2T-10G. At present i have only one WS-SUP32-GE-3B Sup card connected to switch but now I have to install 2 new SUP-2T.

A 6500 comprises a chassis, power supplies, one or two supervisors, line cards and service modules. A chassis can have 3, 4, 6, 9 or 13 slots each (Catalyst model 6503, 6504, 6506, 6509, or 6513, respectively) with the option of one or two modular power supplies. The supervisor engine provides centralised forwarding information and processing; up to two of these cards can be installed in a chassis to provide active/standby or stateful failover. The line cards provide port connectivity and service modules to allow for devices such as firewalls to be integrated within the switch.

00:01:35:%C6KPWR-SP-4-DISABLED: power to module in slot 1 set off (FRU-power failed) Doesn't make sense. The log above tells me the line card in slot 1 is dead but the output in 'sh module' shows an IDSM in slot 1 to be working, HOWEVER, the IDSM in slot 3 is either booting up or not powering up properly.
Cisco 6500/7600 MSFC3/PFC3B Fabric Supervisor Engine, WS-SUP720-3B. The Cisco Catalyst 6500/Cisco 7600 Series Supervisor Engine 720-3B is designed to deliver scalable performance and a rich set of IP features in hardware.

2Operating systems
3Methods of operation
4Power supplies
- 4.1Chassis support
- 4.2Power redundancy options

Supervisor[edit]

Cisco 4500 Supervisor Engines Compatibility

The 6500 Supervisor comprises a Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC) and a Policy Feature Card (PFC). The MSFC runs all software processes, such as routing protocols. The PFC makes forwarding decisions in hardware.

The supervisor has connections to the switching fabric and classic bus, as well as bootflash for the Cisco IOS software.

The latest generation supervisor is the Supervisor 2T.This supervisor was introduced at Cisco Live Las Vegas in July 2011.It provides 80 gigabits per slot on all slots of 6500-E chassis.

Operating systems[edit]

The 6500 currently supports three operating systems: CatOS, Native IOS and Modular IOS.

CatOS[edit]

CatOS is supported for layer 2 (switching) operations only. To be able to perform routing functions (e.g. Layer 3) operations, the switch must be run in hybrid mode. In this case, CatOS runs on the Switch Processor (SP) portion of the Supervisor, and IOS runs on the Route Processor (RP) also known as the MSFC. To make configuration changes, the user must then manually switch between the two environments.

CatOS does have some functionality missing and^[2] is generally considered 'obsolete' compared to running a switch in Native Mode.

Native IOS[edit]

Cisco IOS can be run on both the SP and RP. In this instance, the user is unaware of where a command is being executed on the switch, even though technically two IOS images are loaded—one on each processor. This mode is the default shipping mode for Cisco products and enjoys support of all new features and line cards.

Modular IOS[edit]

Modular IOS is a version of Cisco IOS that employs a modern UNIX-based kernel to overcome some of the limitations of IOS.^[3] Additional to this is the ability to perform patching of processes without rebooting the device and in service upgrades.

Methods of operation[edit]

The 6500 has five major modes of operation: Classic, cef256, dcef256, cef720 and dcef720.

Classic Bus[edit]

The 6500 classic architecture provides 32 Gbit/s centralised forwarding performance.^[4] The design is such that an incoming packet is first queued on the line card and then placed on to the global data bus (dBus) and is copied to all other line cards, including the supervisor. The supervisor then looks up the correct egress port, access lists, policing and any relevant rewrite information on the PFC. This is placed on the result bus (rBus) and sent to all line cards. Those line cards for whom the data is not required terminate processing. The others continue forwarding and apply relevant egress queuing.

The speed of the classic bus is 32gb half duplex (since it is a shared bus) and is the only supported way of connecting a Supervisor 32 engine (or Supervisor 1) to a 6500.

cef256[edit]

This method of forwarding was first introduced with the Supervisor 2 engine. When used in combination with a switch fabric module, each line card has an 8Gbit/s connection to the switch fabric and additionally a connection to the classic bus. In this mode, assuming all line cards have a switch fabric connection, an ingress packet is queued as before and its headers are sent along the dBus to the supervisor. They are looked up in the PFC (including ACLs etc.) and then the result is placed on the rBus. The initial egress line card takes this information and forwards the data to the correct line card along the switch fabric. The main advantage here is that there is a dedicated 8 Gbit/s connection between the line cards. The receiving line card queues the egress packet before sending it from the desired port.

The '256' is derived from a chassis using 2x8gb ports on 8 slots of a 6509 chassis: 16 * 8 = 128, 128 * 2 = 256. The number is doubled because of the switch fabric being 'full duplex'.

dcef256[edit]

dcef256 uses distributed forwarding. These line cards have 2x8gb connections to the switch fabric and no classic bus connection. Only modules that have a DFC (Distributed Forwarding Card) can use dcef.

Unlike the previous examples, the line cards hold a full copy of the supervisor's routing tables locally, as well as its own L2 adjacency table (i.e. MAC addresses). This eliminates the need for any connection to the classic bus or requirement to use the shared resource of the supervisor. In this instance, an ingress packet is queued, but its destination looked up locally. The packet is then sent across the switch fabric, queued in the egress line card before being sent.

cef720[edit]

This mode of operation acts identically to cef256, except with 2x20gb connections to the switch fabric and there is no need for a switch fabric module (this is now integrated into the supervisor). This was first introduced into the Supervisor Engine 720.

The '720' is derived from a chassis using 2x20gb ports on 9 slots of a 6509 chassis. 40 * 9 = 360 * 2 = 720. The number is doubled to the switch fabric being 'full duplex'. The reason 9 slots are used for the calculation instead of 8 for the cef256 is that it no longer needs to waste a slot with the switch fabric module.

dcef720[edit]

This mode of operation acts identically to dcef256, except with 2x20gb connections to the switch fabric.

Power supplies[edit]

The 6500 is able to deliver high densities of Power over Ethernet across the chassis. Because of this, power supplies are a key element of configuration.

Cisco 6500 Supervisor Engine Slot