L3 Switch

joseph.derrick · ‎04-13-2008

What does Supervisor Engines do ?

Jon Marshall · ‎04-13-2008

Joseph

The supervisor engine in Catalyst switches such as the 4500 / 6500 is basically the "brains" of the switch. It is responsible for forwarding both L2 and L3 packets between modules within the switch and with the built in MSFC it is responsible for building the L3 routing tables.

Without a supervisor the switch is just a very expensive door stop :-)

Jon

joseph.derrick · ‎04-13-2008

thanks jon. what is MSFC by the way ?

Jon Marshall · ‎04-13-2008

MSFC = Multi Switch Feature Card. On a 6500 switch it is responsible for control plane functions.

The control plane is responsible for building the L3 forwarding tables, establishing peerings with other L3 neighbors etc.

The supervisor is responsible for the data plane ie. actually forwarding the data, both L2 and L3 data.

Jon

joseph.derrick · ‎04-13-2008

thanks jon.

srue · ‎04-13-2008

Multilayer Switch Feature Card