[c-nsp] in praise of the cat6500 Re: Flow tools

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday, January 25, 2012 05:00:03 PM Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,

Hi, Gert.... I figured the RSFC reference would get a nod.... :-)

> Ah, the times.  The RSFC actually came later, the RSM was before that - 
> not a feature card for the Sup, but a full-sized 7500-RSP2 folded into
> a cat5k line card, talking to the rest of the sytem via a special internal
> trunk.

Oh yes, fun cards.  I have several of the 'non-VIP' cards and one with the VIP piggy-back.  For quite a while I ran at one node an OC3 POS (using a bog-standard 7200-series PA-POS-OC3-SMI) link and a T1 (using a good old 8 port T1 PA) on the RSM+VIP in a Catalyst 5509; one box, did everything.  Including NAT.  Too bad something more modern than 12.2 on RSM or 12.1 on RSFC isn't available; they are nice little routers, IMHO.  In one of the September free upgrade notices a couple or three years ago the last RSM IOS was an impacted version, so I got all ours up to, lessee:

...
cr2-5505-rsm-slot-2 uptime is 1 year, 26 weeks, 3 days, 23 hours, 38 minutes
...
System restarted at 23:01:52 UTC Fri Jul 23 2010
System image file is "slot0:c5rsm-jk9o3sv-mz.122-46a.bin"
...

That one is one half of an HSRP pair for several VLAN's; the other half is in a 5509 halfway across campus.

They of course share the dearth of certain features than 7500's have relative to 7200's (even the RSFC at 12.1 can do some things that the RSM at 12.2 cannot).  That DMA VLAN trunk interface (C5IP) has some quirks, and is not the fastest thing in the world, but it beats trying to use say a 7507 with a couple of GEIP+'s (about the same effective throughput as the C5IP, in my experience).  And MLS with the NFFC and NFFC-II has some nice assist and automation for the RSM.  

> Interesting enough, the RSM was supported in IOS 12.2, while the (much
> faster) RSFC died with 12.1 - which made a big difference for us at the
> time, since 12.2 brought 64bit SNMP counters, and without those, the 
> (otherwise working) VLAN counters on the RSFC are fairly useless...

Yeah, tell me about it....

But the Cat6k and 6k5 are certainly distinct improvements, particularly in backplane bandwidth (32Gb/s versus 3.6Gb/s on 5500 and 1.2Gb/s on 5000) and port density.  And I can even use my Cat8540 power supplies in some of the Cat6k chassis.... <groan>

As Bob Hope would sing : 'thanks for the memories....'