Supervisor Module

mikedelafield · ‎01-04-2008

Without going in to too much detail, could someone just give a brief outline on the benefits of upgrading Supervisor engine?

Say from Supervisor Engine II to Supervisor Engine IV?

Is it mainly just the overall backplane throughput that improves or are there other important benefits?

Also is it worth having redundant Supervisor modules? Realistically, how often would these things die?

ankbhasi · ‎01-04-2008

Hi Mike,

I believe you are talking about supervisors in 4500 platform. If yes sup 2 is only capabale or running CATOS and for any routing part you need another line card which leads to wasting for one slot in expensive chassis.

SUP 4 supports IOS which has integrated routing functionality and supports many advance features as well.

In general if we talk when new sups comes up they come with better hwardware capability and dauther cards which supports more functionality and can scale more. It is always better to have redundancy. Although they d onot often go down but you never know when you get unlucky and due to some reason it goes down we tend to loose network connectivity.

We are leading to world where we can and we have expectations of seemless network no matter whatever happens so on safer side it is always good ot have redundancy. Again this is my point of view.

HTH

Ankur

*Pls rate all helpfull post

glen.grant · ‎01-04-2008

Kind of a wide open question , really depends on how your network is setup and what you are trying to do with that switch . Dual Sup's really depends on whether you and your IT people consider it catastrophic if this device ever goes down . If you can take an outage and the world wouldn't end then maybe you don't need dual Sup's . If it is a core box then its probably a good idea . Really depends on your situation . Yes thruput is somewhat higher on a 4 than a 2 , you would have to look at the specs for specifics.

chschroe · ‎01-05-2008

Honestly, I really think that at the access layer is the key place to have redundant supervisors these days. With more and more high priority voice and video getting put out there, the edge is where the most good can come from a quick failover.

At the core, many people have redundant boxes there in the first place. 2 sups in each won't help you all that much. If you just have the one switch, then definitely redundancy will help.

As to migrating from Sup 2 to 4, there are a lot of other considerations. The Sup 4 natively supports IP routing, IOS, and has enhanced QoS capabilities over the previous platforms. If those things are valuable, you would want to look at an upgrade.

That also being said, the original Sup 2 is no longer supported, which is a major driver in upgrade cycles.

NS

mikedelafield · ‎01-18-2008

so having;

2x4500 chassis's with a supervisor module in each

would be sufficient in terms of redundancy?

2x4500 chassis's with 2 supervisors in each seems like overkill, i guess that is the general view?