6500

Cisco Catalyst 6500 has been around for almost a decade and has gone through two iterations of switch chassis; the original non-E, and the E Chassis. With growing demands for higher bandwidth in today’s network, the next generation of 6500 chassis, rebranded to 6807-XL, has been released by Cisco to support future linecards with increased throughput (> 80Gbps fabric). This article summarizes what you need to know about this product. 

If you are familiar with Nexus 2K in datacenter, let’s meet its counterpart for wiring closet. Cisco Catalyst 6800ia Instant Access has been introduced to fulfill the need of those that use 6500/6800 switches for user access, especially the 6500 knowing that all the its PoE linecards (61xx,63xx,65xx) have become End-of-Sale (EoS). Here is some critical information that will help you decide if 6800ia is right for your environment.

Virtual Switching System (VSS) is a method to combine two physical switches into one logical switch to achieve physical redundancy, Spanning-Tree blocking elimination, and increased bandwidth. VSS was first available in Cisco 6500 but it has recently been introduced to Cisco 4500 and 4500X. This article provides configuration that will allow you to easily enable VSS on these switches.

Domain ID is one of the first parameter you come across when configuring Cisco Virtual Switching Systems (VSS). At first, it might appear that which value you choose is insignificant and you might even be able to use the same number among different VSS switch pairs. This is true as long as those VSS systems are not connected, whether directly or being Layer-2 adjacent, or the virtual MAC address is not implemented. Otherwise, you might find yourself having connectivity issue in your VSS implementation. In this article, we reveal the cause of the issue when connecting two VSS systems that have identical domain ID and offer various options to rectify. Here, we assume that you have basic knowledge of Cisco VSS.