[c-nsp] Move from SXI4 to SXI5

[Phil Mayers]

On 01/26/2011 11:41 PM, Church, Charles wrote:
> All,
>
> 	I've been contemplating moving from SXI4 to SXI5 lately for our VSS
> core router pair.  They're currently doing 4 lite VRFs (no MPLS), all LAN
> modules, all 6700 series blades (10/100/1000), gig SFP, and 16 port 10 gig.
> Some OSPF, no other protocols.  VTPv3 server, using SNMPv3 actively.  Using
> a redundant sup in each chassis (they're in RPR mode).  Acting as NTP
> servers, doing lots of policy routing and WCCP.  Over the last few days of
> adding more and more policy routing and WCCP, the CPU (of active sup) has
> been moving up to 50% and beyond, mostly interrupt based.  However in the
> past, I've seen really high CPU due to that NTP bug.  I've heard rumors of
> lower CPU with SXI5 in general.  Any reason not to move to this?

We've got a couple of boxes on SXI5 (very different config; no VSS, MPLS 
v4/v6 VPNs; sso/nsf failover) and are moving the rest over the next few 
weeks. No problems so far[1] and lots of nasty CEF corruption bugs fixed.

Whether it'll help you specifically I don't know; I'm surprised that 
WCCP and policy routing are consuming noticeable CPU. Certainly the 
latter should be hardware only (not sure about WCCP though).

Have you examined CPU-punt traffic with a SPAN session?


[1] Minor point: no problems except the active/open bugs, which are 
present in all releases of SXI and not fixed yet ;o)