Routing Throughput of Cat5500 RSM in GigE Backbone

[jwitherell]

Does anyone know the throughput of the RSM of a Catalyst 5500? Need to know how it stacks up against 7200, 3600, etc routers. SH PORT says it is connected to the supervisor at 400 Meg and half duplex. I am sure this is not an indicator of total throughput.

One reason why it makes a difference is that we have Cat5500's with Sup 3G's and a GigE backbone. Need to know if the RSM is going to be a significant bottleneck. Currently, the server farm is a separate subnet, so any client packet must be routed twice: Once to get out of his subnet and into the backbone, a second time to get off the backbone and into the farm.

[MickPhelps]

(response removed since it was blatenty incorrect!)

Mick.

[bsivasub]

The Catalyst 5500 switch has a 3.6-Gbps media-independent switch fabric and a 5-Gbps cell-switch fabric and not 400 half-duplex.

You should use MLS so that only the first packet is routed to the RSM and others are MLS switched in layer2. Ofcourse you need to meet the requirements for the MLS.

[MickPhelps]

I stand corrected. I should have checked my sources before blurting!

From cco: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/techno/lnty/etty/ggetty/prodlit/5gig_ov.htm

"...the Catalyst 5500 Series' 3.6-Gbps backplane ..."

Thanks for the quick correction!

Mick.

[jwitherell]

So far, these numbers are for the Cat5500 itself. But I'm looking for throughput numbers of the *Route Switch Module*, the router blade that goes into the Cat5500. Numbers on the Cat are pretty easy to find (although you gave me some reading I hadn't seen yet!), but it seems that the RSM's stats are much harder to find...

[MickPhelps]

A little additional reading...

"The RSM provides high-performance Layer 3 switching, scaling to more than one million packets per second (pps) between switched virtual LANs (VLANs) or emulated LANs (ELANs) across a mixed-media environment. "

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/146/pressroom/1997/jul97/1918.html

Mick.

[csthomas]

I did some throughput testing of a 5500 / sup III / RSM + MLS / bladerunner machine with a Smartbits with a 1 Gb stream, and was sorely disappointed. Two bladerunner ports on the same blade and same vlan do pretty good. Anything else pretty much drives the backplane into the ground, especially with smaller packet sizes. I routinely saw (show traffic) two of the three backplane busses at 99%. A real Gb stream is a challange to any of the older boxes. OTOH, my 6500 + MSFC doesn't even blink at the same load. I suspect your limit won't be the RSM, but the 5500s backplane.

[jwitherell]

I figured that the backplane would be the thing that would be the ultimate bottleneck. I guess it's puzzling to me why the RSM throughput numbers are conspicuously missing. What numbers did you see with the tests? What was the actual throughput you saw from the switch itself, as well as the RSM? Don't suppose you got to compare the RSM to the RSFC? Thanks!