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

[Murphy, William]

We have been using L3 access for a couple of years and it does work quite
well, but we are migrating away from it due to the fact that IPv6 forwarding
in hardware is not doable on our access-layer switches, and it'd cost a
bundle to upgrade everything.  For one of my larger buildings, upgrading to
VSS and moving routing to the distribution was a lot cheaper than buying 45
Sup7's for my 4500 access-layer switches so I can do IPv6 in hardware...

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Alexander Clouter
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 5:34 AM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] VSS - Horror stories, show-stoppers, other personal
experience?

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?

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