Cisco Systems 6503 manual High Availability for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches

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High Availability for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches

Figure 1

The Cisco Catalyst 6500

Series WS-6503,

WS-C6506, WS-C6509,

WS-C6509-NEBS, and

WS-C6513

Overview

Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series multilayer switches have become an essential component of a sound network design in today’s enterprise and service provider environments. Having such a critical role, the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series must provide a reliable switching platform, and offer high performance and intelligent network services. The high availability of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series even has the capability to maintain an IP phone call during supervisor engine failover. This paper discusses how the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series provides high system availability through hardware and software redundancy features, and focuses specifically on the following three areas:

Fabric redundancy of the Switch Fabric Module (SFM)

Supervisor engine redundancy with the Cisco Catalyst Operating System (Catalyst OS), High Availability feature, which includes the stateful protocol redundancy and image versioning functions

•Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC) Cisco IOS® Software redundancy features—Dual Router Mode (DRM), Configuration-Synchronization (config-sync), and Single Router

Mode (SRM).

This paper is based on the hybrid software model for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series (Cisco Catalyst OS on the supervisor engine, Cisco IOS Software on the MSFC) and not on the Cisco IOS Software model (native Cisco IOS Software). All feature set references will be specifically described as a Cisco Catalyst OS feature on a supervisor engine or a Cisco IOS Software feature on an MSFC. The Cisco Catalyst OS High Availability feature was first introduced in the Cisco Catalyst OS 5.4 release and is available for both Cisco Catalyst Supervisor Engine 1A and Catalyst Supervisor Engine 2. Support for DRM began in Cisco IOS Software Release 12.0(7)XE1. The MSFC config-sync redundancy feature for DRM is supported in Cisco IOS Software Release 12.1(3a)E4 for both the MSFC and MSFC2. The MSFC SRM feature was first supported with Cisco Catalyst OS 6.3.1 and Cisco IOS Software Release 12.1(8)E2 for the MSFC2.

This paper is the second version of the original that was written in September 2000. This version includes some updated sections for more precise understanding and a discussion of SRM.

Although component-level redundancy is very important, a high-availability network design relies on the proper combination of individual system redundancy and overall network

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