Catalyst 6500 for beginners

These switches are usually used in Core and/or Distribution of Enterprise network. High speed backplane, feature rich service modules, support for various data center interconnect technologies makes 6500  ideal  choice for multiple roles in data center.

Three types of cards/modules may be installed in the chassis, Ethernet modules , Supervisor Modules and Service Module. Some modules supports capacity enhancement through upgrade/addition of daughter card. Some documents refer modules other than Sup as Line Cards

Each chassis can have two redundant power supply units which can be configured to either for Redundant mode (each uses less than 50% of capacity) or Combined mode. In combined mode power will not be supplier to some module if one power supply fails.

Detachable fan trays can be removed from chassis.

Supervisor module(s) acts as brain of the chassis. Modules with CFC (Centralized forwarding card) uses Supervisor for lookup. However some modules may have DFC which may perform some/many control and data place operations without using Supervisor module.

Communications between various modules happens over backplane. Three backplanes exist in 6500 switches
1) EOBC: Ethernet out of band channel for chassis control
2) Classic BUS: 32GB shared bus for legacy line cards. It comprises DBUS(Data Bus) and RBUS(Result bus)
3) Switch Fabric: for Fabric Line cards
 Forwarding can happen between legacy modules supporting bus and newer modules supporting crossbar switch fabric. Classic Bus supports up to 32Gb and crossbar supports up to 720GB or 2TB (depending on Sup)

Crossbar is a matrix of ‘N’ channels to provide a data path between line cards. All chassis except 6513 supports dual fabric channel. Sup 720 supports 18 channels at 8G/20G per channel and Sup 2T supports26 channel at 20G/40G per channel. show platform hardware capacity fabric can be used to check fabric and bus utilization
Exception:

1) In order to take advantage of the dual fabric channels in slots 1 – 8 of the 6513-E chassis, the Supervisor 2T is required.

2) With any version of the Supervisor 720, the 6513-E fabric channel distribution Is the same as the 6513.

Supervisors cant be installed in slots other than the ones dedicated. Supervisor slot numbers vary from chassis to chassis.
Supervisor slot: 1st and 2nd in 3 and 4 slot chassis, 5th and 6th in 6 and 9 slot chassis, 7th and 8th in 13 slot chassis
All chassis have two slots for Supervisor. If only one supervisor is used the other supervisor slot can be used for a line card except in 6513-E where line card is not supported in sup slots if Sup 2T is used.

MSFC=Performs Control Plane activities, stays in Sup Module

PFC=Performs Data Plane activities, stays in Sup Module

DFC= works like PFC in SUP, does distributed forwarding(offload  PFC workload for that LC), used in LC

CFC=Centralized lookup is performed, uses SUP, used in LC

 

 

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