Shawn,
VSS Active and VSS Standby Chassis
When you create or restart a VSS, the peer chassis negotiate their roles. One chassis becomes the VSS active chassis, and the other chassis becomes the VSS standby.
The VSS active chassis controls the VSS. It runs the Layer 2 and Layer 3 control protocols for the switching modules on both chassis. The VSS active chassis also provides management functions for the VSS, such as module online insertion and removal (OIR) and the console interface.
The VSS active and VSS standby chassis perform packet forwarding for ingress data traffic on their locally hosted interfaces. However, the VSS standby chassis sends all control traffic to the VSS active chassis for processing.
How do you know which Switch you are in when you were not there during the migration of VSS.
You need to know the serial board address then it will easy for you to come to know the switch which you are in.
By default you will be in the Active Switch when you login:
VSS#sh switch virtual
Switch mode : Virtual Switch
Virtual switch domain number : 200
Local switch number : 1
Local switch operational role: Virtual Switch Active >>>> Active Switch
Peer switch number : 2
Peer switch operational role : Virtual Switch Standby >>> Standby Switch
VSS#sh switch virtual role
Switch Switch Status Priority Role Session ID
Number Oper(Conf) Local Remote
------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCAL 1 UP 100(100) ACTIVE 0 0
REMOTE 2 UP 100(100) ACTIVE 7727 8495
show ver:
cisco WS-C6509-E (R7000) processor (revision 1.5) with 983008K/65536K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID XXXXXXXX >>>> This will be your serial number of your chasis.
In this way you will get to know which switch is active.
HTH
Regards
Inayath
