On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Tim Stevenson <[email protected]> wrote:
> The 6500/sup720 on 33SXI supports 100K logical ports in MST, and 12K in > RPVST. That's up from 50K/10K in every prior release. > Did the per-slot limitation change too? N7K supports 75K in MST & 16K in RPVST today. There are no per-module > limitations on N7K. > > Those numbers are based on the requirements we expressed to QA/system test > prior to FCS. The original numbers were confirmed prior to 33SXI was > released. Since then, we have not had a customer requirement/request to > support more, so frankly we have not felt compelled to go and requalifify > for anything greater. Would be curious to know how many logical ports you > are running today & in what protocol? > First, I'm sorry for not being clear. While the virtual port per-slot limitation is an issue with our distribution switches, when we discussed a Nexus based solution with Cisco the big sticking point was actually with using the 5000 series as access switches for customer servers to plug into in the data center. There were 2 major issues: 1. Wiring is a huge issue for us, especially as we migrate to all gigabit and lose RJ21 support on the switches. Cisco's suggestion was that we could use the Nexus and have only a single network cable to every server (just tag all the networks you want, plus FCoE). However, we use private vlans for the backup network, and sometimes for other things. We can't tag a pvlan to a customer, and the switch has no way to present what needs to effectively be a pvlan host port as a tag to a customer. Cisco did say that a feature to deal with this might be coming. 2. Nexus 5000 only supported 256 VLANs at the time, with support for 512 coming soon. I have ~550 VLANs today, and the number is only that low because I artificially chopped my largest data center into 2 smaller networks because of STP hardware limitations in Cisco's switches. Additionally, when I asked about the virtual port limitations, I was told there is no per-slot limit, but there is a 3000 logical port limitation on the chassis as a whole, which again doesn't even come close to meeting my needs. This discussion was about 6 months ago, and really focused on the Nexus 5000 series as an option to replace both our distribution and access/edge switches. I can't really remember if the 7000 series was discussed at all. It may have been skipped over for price reasons. I am running rapid-PVSTP, and my switches are running various SXF code. Below is the busiest switch I could find. This is an "old" network whose growth has been capped because of STP hardware limitations. We don't allow any new customers on this network, and built a 2nd network in the same building for new customers. The VLAN count on this switch does still slowly rise though as existing customers on the old network continue to expand. #sh vlan vir Slot 1 ------- Total slot virtual ports 6448 Slot 2 ------- Total slot virtual ports 1636 Total chassis virtual ports 8084 #sh mod Mod Ports Card Type Model Serial No. --- ----- -------------------------------------- ------------------ ----------- 1 16 SFM-capable 16 port 1000mb GBIC WS-X6516A-GBIC 2 4 CEF720 4 port 10-Gigabit Ethernet WS-X6704-10GE 5 2 Supervisor Engine 720 (Active) WS-SUP720-3B It's pretty much always the 6516-GBIC cards that lead downstream to access switches that have the high virtual port counts. In the end, one of the biggest hassles this creates is the physical server placement problems after chopping things up into smaller networks. We might start out saying we'll cap network growth to roughly room-sized. Room 1 is network 1. When that gets mostly full, we start putting new customers on network 2 in room 2. At some point in the future, both room 1 and room 2 become nearly full and we start network 3 in room 3. Room 1 and 2 continue to grow slowly due to existing customer expansion, and at some point they become 100% full and those customers still want to add servers. Then we end up with network 1 being extended to row 1 of room 3, network 2 in row 2 of room 3, and then rows 3 and higher in room 3 are network 3. Wait, the building is 100% full now, so we need to expand the 3 old networks to a few rows in a new building down the street? Building 1 network 1 will be present in building 2 room 1 row 1 too, etc.... This is all great fun to try to keep straight. :) _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
