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

[Timh Bergström]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 8:42 PM, Tore Anderson
<tore.anderson at redpill-linpro.com> wrote:
> * 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/
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We're currently having problems with Cisco DAC's (5m) active cables
that only shows up as "ge" ports in our EX4500-VC and won't come
online (Intel 10G NIC in the other end, works fine with
Dell-switches/modules). We're running 11.3R4.2, I've heard some
unofficial rumors about this version and earlier that won't "take" 3rd
party sfp+, we have a couple of juniper DAC's and a couple of 3rd
party sfp+ (coded as Juniper) that works fine though.

To be honest we're not running any Juniper SFP/XFP/SFP+ transceivers
and it has worked great for us so far, it's just the Cisco active ones
that won't come up.

If I have time I will upgrade to the latest recommended software or
just go with the 3rd party vendor and run fiber-cables instead.

-- 
Timh Bergström
Head of System Operations
Videoplaza/System Operations

timh.bergstrom at videoplaza.com
+46 727 406 845
S:t Eriksgatan 46
Stockholm
www.videoplaza.com

skype: timh_bergstrom
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