[c-nsp] ME3600X IOS 15.1(2a)EY1a Code: [Was: Re: Cisco ME3600X and Bridge-Domain Routing config question}

[Reuben Farrelly]

On 15/12/2011 4:06 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
>> - IPv6 is in, enabled, and it works well carrying 50+
>> prefixes and OSPFv3 within our AS.  Not a hugely taxing
>> environment, but IPv6 works.
>
> I tested IPv6 - yes, it's enabled but massively broken:
...
> 	o As much as every bone in my body was saying,
> 	  "What's left is v4 stuff, you can't possibly be
> 	  thinking about that", I decided to remove an
> 	  outbound v4 ACL. And voila! You can imagine how
> 	  wide I had to open my mind to do that :-).

Yikes.  I don't have this problem in my deployment so far as I have 
pushed this job onto edge routers to do this function on all 
ingress/egress points to our network.

>> - Issues CSCtr83500 and CSCtr83418 are fixed - so hardset
>> and auto speed/duplex ports is no longer a showstopper.
>
> We do see issues in 12.2(52)EY2 where the Gig-E ports don't
> report utilization statistics for the interface. I'm not
> running any traffic on any of the Gig-E ports in my lab
> right now, so can't tell whether this issue is fixed in the
> new code.
>
> Not sure whether you're seeing anything like this. The
> 10Gbps uplink ports are fine, though, even in the older
> code. The issue only affects the Gig-E ports.
>
> I'll get a chance to pump some traffic through and test.

I'm not seeing this, no.

But I have noted that VLAN interfaces do not have accurate counters (on 
any release).  This is unlike my ME6524 and 7600's where I have SNMP 
pollable counters for these interfaces.

> As it stands now, I'm glad to see that the issues with QoS
> are not hardware related, so far.
>
>> For example applying a very basic 10M
>> inbound and outbound policer on a VLAN interface to rate
>> limit a customer for example, is not as simple as say, a
>> software based router.
>
> We normally apply the service policy either on the physical
> interface or EVC.

My requirement has to date been to do this on VLAN interfaces - maybe I 
should look into doing this on an EFP on this platform to see if it's 
any better.

I've been able to get away with this functionality on 7200s and 
1800/1900/2800/2900 ISR's and more or less on the 7600 and ME6524 in the 
past:

policy-map police-10M
  class class-default
   police cir 10240000 bc 1250000
    conform-action transmit
    exceed-action drop

On those platforms this allows me to rate limit (in both directions if 
need be) a customer port or VLAN or subinterface to 10M and is 
presumably independent of whether the traffic is IPv4 or IPv6.  The 
point is it's simple and it works.

Trying to apply this on the ME3600X results in:

sw6.nsw(config-if)#service-policy output police-10M
QoS: Invalid target for service-policy
QoS: Configuration errors for policymap police-10M
sw6.nsw(config-if)#
sw6.nsw(config-if)#service-policy input police-10M
QoS: Invalid target for service-policy
QoS: Configuration errors for policymap police-10M
sw6.nsw(config-if)#

The documentation:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/switches/metro/me3600x_3800x/software/release/15.1_2_ey/configuration/guide/swqos.html

suggests it's not nearly that straightforward to set up, and looks more 
like Catalyst QoS hell :-(


>> Note:  there are 21 pages of resolved caveats in this
>> code compared to the original 15.1(2)EY release.  It's
>> undoubtedly a good thing that problems are being fixed,
>> however 21 pages of caveats resolved (about 180 bugs)
>> and IPv6 support appearing is arguably more than a
>> "minor rebuild" as the version number would indicate,
>> but sounds rather like some serious fixes have gone on
>> behind the scenes.
>
> Do you have a link to the release notes? I normally follow
> the one in the download section but that one definitely
> isn't 21 pages long :-).

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/metro/me3600x_3800x/software/release/15.1_2_ey/release/notes/ol25360.html#wp954239

Additionally the configuration guide now includes a section on 
configuring IPv6.

> PS: some key things we're still missing on this box (there's
>      more but these are the ones I think the list would find
>      more generic across operators):
>
> 	- v4 and v6 uRPF support.
> 	- EVC SNMP monitoring.
> 	- 4-byte ASN support.
> 	- MC-LAG.

Yep I'm still missing a bit of basic stuff too - picture this:

- A wholesale carrier hands off a 1G dot1q trunk port to us
- Each end customer is assigned an individual VLAN on that trunk by the 
carrier
- We need to be able to rate limit/police (or shape I guess) all traffic 
in and out on the specific EVC/VLAN for a customer to a given contracted 
amount (tricky if it works at all)
- We also need to be able to see and graph interface counters for each 
EVC/VLAN for Cacti/Solarwinds (at present this does not work on VLAN 
interfaces)

Now:

sw1.qld#show ethernet service instance detail
Service Instance ID: 780
Service Instance Type: static
Associated Interface: GigabitEthernet0/15
Associated EVC:
L2protocol drop
CE-Vlans: 

Encapsulation: untagged
Interface Dot1q Tunnel Ethertype: 0x8100
State: Up
EFP Statistics:
    Pkts In   Bytes In   Pkts Out  Bytes Out
   52516561 14944728475   56861858 28340980592

May be useful to graph throughput, but it's not clear if these stats 
appear in SNMP or not (or if they are accurate or not).  But it does 
look somewhat promising in that the numbers exist, are large, and 
increasing.

Reuben