[c-nsp] Cat6500 modular IOS - direction?

[Abello, Vinny]

Hi all,

 

So, I've been reading many posts, Cisco documentation and release notes and
testing various versions of 12.2(33)SXH and SXI in a lab environment. Based
on all the Cisco marketing fluff, modular IOS seems like the way to go for
reliability. Real world experience from many smart people on this list seem
to have the opposite opinion. I've read things indicating that the platform
is going to be going all modular in the future (and one thing that said the
opposite??). I'm further very confused by Cisco dropping the install command
from SXI3 onward so there is no more patching which was one of the
advantages to using it. I still like the idea of the protected memory and
modern microkernel, but not if the platform is still buggy. Safe Harbor
releases of modular seem to be mostly parallel with Safe Harbor releases of
monolithic IOS. I also noted a few minor features that would be "nice" to
have that are only in monolithic, but not in modular according to feature
navigator. I can certainly live without them though, especially if the
platform is more robust and stable, but I can't seem to decide if that's
truly the case. I can think of a small handful of scenarios in my experience
in the last 10 years where being able to restart a process in IOS may have
been helpful, but it's very few and far between.

 

I think this question seems to come up quite a bit and was discussed a
little recently. So my question is this: Is anyone using modular IOS in
production with stellar results where they have not regretted doing so?
Also, is Cisco really moving to a pure modular offering on the 6500 platform
in the future?

 

Thanks for any input and insight into the matter.

 

 

-Vinny