Switch with 48 10gig interfaces

[Raghavendra Rai]

Hi all,

I was refering to an old discission thread here,

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/835480#835480

I am wondering which switch is better to get 48 10 gig intefaces, (24 ports first and an expansion option for another 24)

4500 with sup 7-E or Nexus 5020P-BF ?? Can anyone compare these two? which one would be the cost effective solution?

Your views/suggestions will help.

Thanks in advance,

Raghavendra

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Raghavendra

There is simply no comparison in terms of performance  for 10Gbps (or much else)  between the two switches.

The 4500 even with a sup7 supports up to 48Gbps per slot. So whatever 10Gbps cards you purchased you could only use 4 of the ports on each cards before you oversubscribed that card. So lets say you purchased a 4510 chassis and had 8 slots to insert linecards.

8 x 4 = 32 so you can't reach your 48 port count. If you could use 9 slots (can't remember with the 4500 whether the spare sup slot can be used for linecards) you can still only reach 36 ports before oversubscription.

The Nexus 5020 however is according to Cisco wirespeed ie. from the Nexus 5000 datasheets -

Nonblocking Line-Rate Performance

All the 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches can handle packet flows at wire speed. The absence of resource sharing helps ensure the best performance of each port regardless of the traffic patterns on other ports. The Cisco Nexus 5020 can have 52 Ethernet ports at 10 Gbps sending packets simultaneously without any effect on performance, offering true 1.04-Tbps bidirectional bandwidth.

So you can have all 52 ports running with no oversubscription.

Now, whether or not you need wirespeed is the more important question. If you don't then yes you could look at the 4500 although i still don't see the 4500 as a 10Gbps switch and by that i mean you may well use 10Gbps ports in a 4500 but it's primary purpose is not to provide 10Gbps connectivity to the network.

Basically these switches are providing very different things so they are not really comparable.

The 4500 is a full L3 capable switch used in the access/distribution layer within your network.

The Nexus 5020 is L2 only and is concerned with moving data as quickly as possible from A to B.

If your primary concern is with 10Gbps throughput then out of these 2 switches the Nexus is the obvious choice.

Jon

[Raghavendra Rai]

Thanks Jon,

That clears my doubt.

Raghavendra

[Raghavendra Rai]

Hello Jon/others,

I am planning to go with Nexus switch for the 24 port 10gig line speed requirement.

But now the customer is asking somehting like this:

Whether the nexus switch will be able to do the below? I am not able to understand the exact requirement here as there is no complete picture of the exact requirement here. So thought of asking your help, is something like below is possible in Nexus 5k?

Aggregation and Session AwareTraffic Distribution :

The device should be able to aggregate Network traffic from all the ports designated as input ports and then distribute the combined traffic across the ports designated as output ports in such a way that:

·        Load is balanced/distributed fairly across the output ports with maximum deviation of 15 % from the expected value (where the expected value is total input traffic / number of output links) when the input traffic has fair amount of variation in the distribution criteria.

·        Distribution should be flow/session based (all the packets belonging to one TCP/IP transport layer session is sent to the same egress port).

When ‘Source IP – Destination IP’ criteria is used for the distribution,  all the traffic between two Systems (IP addresses) should always be forwarded to the same egress link

Configurable Criteria for session aware load Distribution:

. The set of parameters can be any one or more of the L2 – L4 parameters listed below:

·        Source MAC

·        Destination MAC

·        Source IP

·        Destination IP

·        Source Port

·        Destination Port

·        Protocol

·        VLAN, QoS, IP Service Type

Your valuable comments/views will really help.

Thanks,

Raghavendra

[letsgomets]

Raghavendra,

In response to your latest post it sounds like the requirements are referencing link aggregation or port channeling.

The Nexus can perform link aggregation and session aware load balancing. You can achieve that by way or source and destination IP etherchannel load balancing.

As far as the first requirement, it sounds as if they do not want more than 15% oversubscription on the aggregation ports. I believe the Nexus has a limitation of 16 port channel members. On a 48 port switch at all 10G with max of 16 for port channel that leaves you 32 available 10G ports. That would give you 50% oversubscription. You would not be able to fulfill the first requirement provided my understanding of the first requirement is accurate.

[Raghavendra Rai]

Thank you.

While configuring  port channel load balancing in Nexus, Is it possible to do loadbalancing with below parameters ?

     Protocol (IP/IPX)

  VLAN, QoS, IP  Service Type

I found only the following parameters as an option, can you please tell me whether the above parameters are also possible?

switch(config)#                      port-channel load-balance                       ethernet {destination-ip |                      destination-mac |                      destination-port |                      source-dest-ip |                      source-dest-mac |                      source-dest-port |                      source-ip |                      source-mac |                      source-port}
 

It will really help if you can give some configuration example as well.

Thanks,

Raghavendra