[c-nsp] 7600 10GE card recommendations (1 & 2 port cards)

[Nick Hilliard]

On 13/11/2013 10:20, James Bensley wrote:
> WS-X6501-10GEX4:

this is an ancient line card.  They have trashy buffers, trashy buffering
mechanisms, bad qos and don't support vpls (although they can run l2vpn and
l3vpn).  I would avoid them like the plague.

> 7600-ES20-10G3C:
> This seems more what I'm after, 2x 10G ports, no too expensive, plus
> they look like they will do line rate 10 gig.

these cards are rubbish because they don't achieve what they set out to do.
 Although they support vpls, they have a fatal flaw in that they don't
support local vlan significance.  Local vlan significance means that vlan X
on one port or one ethernet service instance is the same as vlan X on
another port or another ethernet service instance.  This means it's
practically impossible to provide complex metro ethernet services on the
cards because of the risk of overlapping vlan IDs.  The problem was fixed
on the plus variant of the card.

Also, these cards have a builtin DFC, which means that you need to match
this with your SUP.  As you're already using RSP720-3CXLs, if you put a
DFC3C line card in, you'll cause the entire chassis to drop its forwarding
capacity to RSP720-3C status, i.e. 240k ipv4 routes.  This is probably not
what you want.

Unless you need to run vpls services on your 10G cards, you should probably
pick up some 4 port WS-X6704-10GE line cards on ebay because they're cheap.
 They have a pile of well documented problems, but if you're looking for a
simple uplink for transporting mpls packets, they will be fine.

Nick