[c-nsp] New Catalyst 6k chassis

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Wed, 26 Jun 2013, Jeff Kell wrote:

> On 6/26/2013 11:10 PM, Justin M. Streiner wrote:
>> It just seems like the new 6k is positioned to poach prospective
>> customers from the (arguably) higher-margin Nexus 7k product line.
>
> Now that you mention the "N-word" I have to ask (as we're looking into a
> deployment)...  how much of it is ready for prime time, and feature
> compatible with the Catalysts?

One thing that is not there yet is EoMPLS support.  You can pass LDP 
through the box, but you can't land tunnels yet.  That's supposed to be in 
NOS 6.2, which I've been told several times will be released by the end of 
this quarter (read: Friday...).

Under the hood, NX-OS is Linux, and the OS is modular, and features can be 
enabled/disabled, based on the licenses you purchased.

There are a number of IOS <-> NX-OS quirks in the command-line, like 
commands that have syntax that's just different enough to be kind of 
frustrating when troubleshooting an issue at 2 AM :I

Another gotcha is the difference(s) between M1 and M2 series linecards. 
You can't build a port-channel across M1 and M2 linecards, and M1 
linecards have limitations such as bandwidth constraints to each ASIC 
group (normally 4 ports).  There are cases where you could need to change 
one of the ports in the ASIC group to full-rate mode, which shuts down the 
other 3 ports in the group...  I haven't had a chance to test if there are 
gotchas when running things like SPAN ports.

We've migrated one site from a Cat6509E to a Nexus 7009, and a few 
transitional bumps aside, that went pretty smoothly.  IPv6 support seems 
pretty solid, but I don't have enough v6 traffic at the moment to really 
exercise the box.

> I've been nudged toward the 5K series, but have heard the L3 version
> isn't ready for prime time (oversubscribed L3 module).

I haven't used any L3 features on the 5Ks, but the L2 / FEX / vPC stuff is 
pretty solid.  We've had 5Ks in various places for 3 years without any 
major blips.

> I've been pointed at the 6K series, but somewhat amused by the 40G
> "splits" to 10G...

Haven't tried out the 6K yet.

> We are currently a 6500-based shop for Core and Border, FWIW.

Our border and core (I'm also in the .edu world) are separated - we don't 
carry full routes internally, so I also don't know if any gotchas related 
to slinging around large numbers of v4/v6 routes.

jms