Cisco Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series VSSE 720 with 10GE uplinks Information Guide

Q&A

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Removes the need for Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP),

and Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP)

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CiscoWorks LAN Management System (LMS) 3.0 can be used to centrally manage a Cisco Catalyst 6500

virtual switch as a single entity.

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Multichassis EtherChannel

(MEC) is a Layer 2 multipathing technology that creates simplified loop-free

topologies, eliminating the dependency on Spanning Tree Protocol, which can still be activated to protect

strictly against any user misconfiguration.

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Flexible deployment options. The underlying physical switches do not have to be colocated. The two physical

switches are connected with standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and as such can be located any

distance based on the distance limitation of the chosen 10 Gigabit Ethernet optics. For example, with X2-

10GB-ER 10 Gigabit Ethernet optics, the switches can be located up to 40 km apart.

2. VSS boosts nonstop communications.

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Interchassis stateful failover results in no disruption to applications that rely on network state information (for

example, forwarding table info, NetFlow, Network Address Translation [NAT], authentication, and

authorization). VSS eliminates L2/L3 protocol reconvergence if a virtual switch member fails, resulting in

deterministic subsecond virtual switch recovery.

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Utilizes EtherChannel (802.3ad or Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) for deterministic subsecond Layer 2 link

recovery, removing the dependency on Spanning Tree Protocol for link recovery.

3. VSS scales system bandwidth capacity to 1.4 Tbps.

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Activates all available Layer 2 bandwidth across redundant Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches with

automatic, even load sharing. Link load sharing is optimized because it is based on more granular

information, such as L2/L3/L4 parameters, unlike virtual LAN (VLAN)-based load balancing in Spanning Tree

Protocol configuration.

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Enables standards-based link aggregation for server network interface card (NIC) teaming across redundant

data center switches, maximizing server bandwidth throughput and increasing the number of standards-

based components in the data center (that is, server NICs) with needing to configure proprietary NIC vendor

mechanisms.

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Maximizes the utilization of all (132) 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a Cisco Catalyst 6500 virtual switch.

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Conserves bandwidth by:

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Eliminating unicast flooding caused by asymmetrical routing in traditional campus designs.

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Optimizing the number of hops for intracampus traffic using multichassis EtherChannel enhancements.

4. VSS utilizes existing multilayer switching architecture.

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VSS enhances existing multilayer switching architecture using simplification of architecture without

fundamentally changing the architecture resulting in easy of adoption of the technology.

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Uses existing Cisco Catalyst 6500 investments, easing the deployment of VSS. The VSS is supported on

non-E and E series Catalyst 6500 Series Switches chassis and supports all Cisco Catalyst 6500 series 6700

series modules.

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VSS uses standards-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity between the Cisco Catalyst 6500 virtual switch

members, allowing for flexible distance options. The underlying physical switches do not have to be

collocated.