CatOS and IOS

vijaya.tekala · ‎11-10-2009

Hello all

I am new to this forum/discussions and I hope i will find great help from all.I am working towards BCMSN and I am bit confused about Cat OS and Cat IOS. Any help would be appericaited.

Thanks in advance

Edison Ortiz · ‎11-10-2009

When you see any reference related to CatOS, it pertains to an old operating system supported on Catalyst switches. The commands and syntax under that operating system are very different than a regular Cisco IOS router.

Cisco decided to unified the commands and syntax across platforms and Catalyst switch IOS was created. If you know regular Cisco router IOS, you can quickly configure a Catalyst switch running IOS without going through the learning curve. You will find some limitation on commands in switches but they are mostly due to hardware constraint.

Joseph W. Doherty · ‎11-10-2009

Just to add to Edison's information, some of the chassis switches could run both Cat OS and IOS, at the same time. Cat OS controlled the L2 switch features, IOS controlled the L3 features. This existed for the reason that the L3 hardware was often an option on the chassis supervisor and so it ran its own code. At least on the 6500 series, this became known as hybrid mode. Later IOS images, on such platforms, supported both L2 and L3 directly, and became known as native mode.