[j-nsp] EX4500 - 3rd party DAC/Twinax cable support - link-up at 1g instead of 10g

[Dale Shaw]

Hi all,

I have a customer that is trying to connect some ESX hosts at 10g to a
recently commissioned EX4500 VC.

Their ESX hosts are IBM servers, and they were supplied with the
following DAC cables:

Cable: IBM Twin-ax Active Cable 5M, PN: 45W3039
Cable labelled as: Brocade 10G Active 5M FCoE, 58-1000023-01

The (two-member) EX4500 VC is running JUNOS 12.1R1 (mostly due to this
release being the first to officially support "active" DAC cables).

The EX4500 detects the interface when plugged into an SFP+ slot but
the line speed/link-up speed is 1g (ge-*), not 10g (xe-*). Note there
are no uplink modules installed; we're going directly into the
built-in ports.

Other info:
ESX Version: ESX 4.1.0 Build 582267
Adapter Model: IBM 42C1801
ESX networking driver: qlgc-qlge-1.0.0.45-100.27-offline_bundle-418618

Has anyone experienced this before? JTAC didn't provide much insight,
other than to try a Juniper branded cable (e.g. EX-SFP-10GE-DAC-5m or
EX-SFP-10GE-ACT-5M). So, that's our next step.

Any other tips?

cheers,
Dale