[c-nsp] VSS - Horror stories, show-stoppers, other personal experience?

[Andrew Miehs]

On Friday, June 17, 2011, Mike G <geezyx at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone had personal experience with a VSS deployment?  If so, do you
> have any horror stories, caveats, and/or recommendations?  I'm also
> interested in people's experience with IPv6 implementation in a VSS
> environment.

We have 5 VSS systems in production for about one and a half years ( I
think sxi2a ) and so far have had only one crash - caused a 20 second
outage. We are using them as building distribution switches ( combined
pe, ce functionality ). Our cores switches run mpls and only the
distribution switches are connectd to these so no need for hsrp.

We have had great eperience with these systems - but initial config
can be a pain - on mistake and you need to start from scratch.
I am a little worried what will happen when we have a real problem on
these boxes - whether we can debug quickly enough - as the 6500 take
20 minutes to boot....

The new software should now support dual supervisor per chasis and
soon with the sup 2t 4 chasis!

We are only running IPv4 on our boxes - (entereprise environment).

All that being said, if it was me - I would run hsrp for the mission
critical stuff- coming from a routing background.
My colleagues, coming from a switching background would run vss.

Regards

Andrew