topic Re: Features for Nexus 9000 (N9K-C93180YC-FX) with NO license in Data Center Switches

Features for Nexus 9000 (N9K-C93180YC-FX) with NO license

Martin2m2 — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:48:11 GMT

Dear community members,

What features does a N9K-C93180YC-FX support with NO (additional) license?

Customer needs two Nexus switches to do vPC with multiple 25G LACP connections to local VMware servers and shared 4x 25G iSCSI storage. Nothing fancy and they are not part of any bigger datacenter setup. DCNM support not needed at this point.

The Nexus licensing guide: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/nx-os/licensing/guide/b_Cisco_NX-OS_Licensing_Guide/b_Cisco_NX-OS_Licensing_Guide_chapter_01.html

Tells what features can be licensed, but nothing about what standard is included with NX-OS.

Re: Features for Nexus 9000 (N9K-C93180YC-FX) with NO license

Sergiu.Daniluk — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 07:46:54 GMT

Hi @Martin2m2

There is no 'base' license pre-installed on Nexus 9K switches. You need to order one of the Ess / Adv / Prem tier.

On the other hand, Nexus 9K switches are working based on honor-based licensing system. Which means you can use any feature without being enforced to have the license installed. However, if you experience any issue and request for support, if license is not installed, well, the support service may be declined :-)

Stay safe,

Sergiu

Re: Features for Nexus 9000 (N9K-C93180YC-FX) with NO license

TONY SMITH — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 08:53:38 GMT

According to CCW that model can be ordered without any licence, and the legacy licences like "LAN Enterprise" are still shown as orderable (and much less than these new bundles).

Looking in the configuration guides there are a few features that state that no licence is required, for example ...

Cisco NX-OS vPCs require no license. Any feature not included in a license package is bundled with 
the Cisco NX-OS system images and is provided at no extra charge to you.

So it looks to me as if you could check each of the features you want to use, and see what licence if any is required. You might want to run that past your Cisco AM, or partner, just to confirm.