We currently have a single Cisco Catalyst 4510 with dual supervior IV modules and dual power supplied. It's central to our network with workgroup switches and servers connecting to it.
My question is how internally redundant is a Cisco 4510?
Basically investigating our options in making the core more fault tolerant but haven't found a lot of information around what could go wrong with a 4510. Trying to decide whether we should add another 4500 series switch to the core or upgrade to something like a 6500.
there are backplane traces to both Sups from each card, so you can tolerate loss of most things as long as your network design does not depend on a single I/O blade.
The old joke is that it is not resilient until it could survive a nutter with a sledgehammer :) - but not many sites meet that spec...
6500 gets you more of everything - bandwidth and flexibility mainly but you also get Netflow on some setups which might be importantm and better inservice upgrade - but 1 box has inherent limitations.
so i would go for 2 4510s as dual star points for the network - even if they do not have dual sups.
1 thing that does limit a 4500 is that there is "only" 6 Gbps of bandwidth between each blade and the Sup - might be an issue depending on your traffic patterns.
We have deployed everything across multiple line cards so we have been rather happy with the single switch however we are going through the process of eliminating single points of failure.
Budget isn't a problem so we might look at a 6500 series device so that we can go to 10GE modules.
Check your supervisor module failover configuration. Just because there are two supervisor cards does not mean that the best failover method possible happen. One failover method waits for the second supervisor module to boot while stateful switchover (SSO) quickly moves to the new supervisor card.
Another failure when only the one modular switch is used, other than the software crashing, is a backplane failure. The idea of having 2 switches is good, especially when an etherchannel can interconnect them, except for all of the hosts which formerly connected to a single switch. That might be a problem to move in the event of a failure. One solution is to have single homed hosts connect to a third switch with dual uplinks into both 4500s.
----- Scott Perry Indianapolis, IN
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Thanks for the info.
We have deployed everything across multiple line cards so we have been rather happy with the single switch however we are going through the process of eliminating single points of failure.
Budget isn't a problem so we might look at a 6500 series device so that we can go to 10GE modules.
Thanks for the info on the quick supervisor fail over, I double checked our configuration and it's set correctly.
Backplane failure is probably our biggest concern, software crashing and having to reboot it is a problem but relatively quick to resolve whereas a backplane problem, although rare it has the potential to cause a major outage in our environment.
We actually have the same configuration over a number of sites and are looking into the 6500 as a possible replacement versus adding another
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