4510R-E & WS-X4648-RJ45V+E Line Card Limit

[stewartjs]

Is there a way around the port limit for the 4510R-E and the E-Series line cards? Why even buy a 4510R-E if you can't fill the thing up with matching line cards? I'm hoping there is a work around.

[Jon Marshall]

Jeff

"Why even buy a 4510R-E if you can't fill the thing up with matching line cards?"

Because it's quite a bit cheaper than a 6500 switch. I'm not being flippant but it really does boil down to that. If you really need to push 40+Gbps through each line card then the 4500 switch is not the solution you should be looking at.

But it is rare to need to have all ports running at full speed at the same time and that is the trade off. Do you really need that much throughput on the switch ?

The 4500 is good for port density, PoE etc. in the access-layer with the assumption you don't need full throughput on each line card. It can also be used in the core but again with the same provisos.

Jon

[stewartjs]

Jon,

Point taken on the 4500 vs 6500 cost.

I guess at this point I'm really looking for a work around to power on 8 E-Series cards in an E-Series 4510. I'm really not worried about the oversubscription. Do you know if this is possibl?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Jon Marshall]

Jeff

Depends on your power supplies and whether you run in combined or redundant mode and also how much power the phone ?? is drawing.

I recall from a design i did a while back that we managed to run 4507R chassis populated with 48 port blades and ran the switches in redundant mode with PoE to all ports.

But i never did it with 4510 chassis. You need to use the Cisco power calculator for this sort of thing -

http://tools.cisco.com/cpc/launch.jsp

you will need a CCO login to access the above tool.

Jon

[stewartjs]

Jon,

My understand of the the limit on ports isn't based on how much power the poe is using. It's based on over-subscription of ports data wise. The E-series are 2/1 where the classic cards are 8/1. Check out table 2 on this site;

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/modules/ps2710/ps5494/product_data_sheet0900aecd802109ea.html

My problem is I have a 4510R-E and 8 E-Series cards and they wont all come on because Cisco didn't want an 8/1 like the classic cards. Thoughts?

[Jon Marshall]

Jeff

My apologies, i missed that.

So according to the table you can have a maximum of 5 WS-X4648-RJ45V+E modules in the chassis.

But do you need 24Gbps per line card for all line cards or even some of them. What i mean by that is the classic line cards have an 8/1 oversubscription, is this not acceptable for a lot of the devices you are connecting into the switch ie. end user pcs, IP Phones etc.

If you have some power users then perhaps use the E-series line cards for them and the classic line cards for the others.

If this is not acceptable then unfortunately it is back to the 6500 switch i'm afraid.

Jon

[stewartjs]

Jon,

Thanks for your feedback. It looks like we will just have to mix between the classic and E series cards.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Since you're not too concerned about oversubsciption, a work around option would be to fan out some of your 4500 ports to L2 switches.