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

[Tore Anderson]

* Dale Shaw

> 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.

Hi,

I bought a couple of 3rd party 5m active cables (that were supposed to
be coded for Juniper EX) that showed up as ge-* interfaces. We were
connecting them to a pair of Cisco Nexus 5010s, which detected them
correctly.

We noticed that some 3m «official» Cisco cables we had lying around
worked fine, so we asked the cable provider to copy the EEPROM ID (or
whatever it is called) from one of those onto the 3rd party ones, and
that made them work fine. It shows up in "show chassis hardware" like this:

Xcvr 11               NON-JNPR     F111026008        SFP+-10G-CU3M

And "show chassis pic fpc-slot 0 pic-slot 0":

11    10GBASE CU 3M     n/a   CISCO-TYCO      2053783-2      n/a


This is a EX4500 VC running 11.1R3.5, the cables are plugged into the
built-in ports. Everything runs great now.

Best regards,
-- 
Tore Anderson
Redpill Linpro AS - http://www.redpill-linpro.com/