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

[Alexander Clouter]

Murphy, William <William.Murphy at uth.tmc.edu> wrote:
> 
> We are running VSS for distribution layer switching in a campus 
> environment and have been quite pleased with it...  Benefits for us 
> are simplification, faster convergence and better performance 
> (distribution of traffic)...  
>
Only curious, VSS we (a small university) felt was way to expensive to 
do and did not give us many benefits.

> No more STP blocking ports, MCE to access-layer so both links are 
> utilized, faster convergence, no need for HSRP, also our two 10G 
> uplinks are equal-cost even though they are connected to separate 
> chassis...
>
Would you say it's easier than just running an IGP (OSPF, EIGRP, ISIS or 
iBGP) and pushing L3 to the access layer of your network, or has VSS 
really made things a lot simpler?  Only asking you as I know no one 
nearby who went the VSS route and unfortunately the only people raving 
about it are sales people, hardly a great frame of reference :)

I can see VSS helping out when you have VLAN's spanning buildings[1], 
and it be a real uphill struggle to get the sysadmin's of the systems on 
those VLANs to use localised subnets instead, but surely it's more cost 
effective and does not limit your future options to do a migration to L3 
up to the access layer everywhere than deploy VSS?

Plus, the cynic in me is more interested in the failure modes.  If 
everything goes horribly wrong, I am more comfortable pulling apart 
OSPF/EIGRP frames rather than some new fango Cisco thingy mcwhatsit :)

Cheers

[1] once TRILL comes along, what else does VSS offer?

-- 
Alexander Clouter
.sigmonster says: Do you guys know what you're doing, or are you just hacking?