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

[Dale Shaw]

Hi all,

Just following up on this post from April. My customer followed
through with JTAC and eventually it was determined that, while active
DAC cable support was planned for introduction in JUNOS 12.1, it
didn't actually make it.

References to active DAC cable support disappeared from various
documents in late May (12.1 release notes, etc.)

JTAC said: "The Active DACs that are coming for EX's will be first
supported on the EX8200's and could be coming next release."

cheers,
Dale

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Dale Shaw <dale.shaw+j-nsp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.