Cisco Nexus 9300 Virtual Port Channel Support

[CSCO10675262_2]

Hi,

As I am new to Nexus 9300 and I was wondering if the switch may support virtual port channel (VPC)? I was wondering if there may be any feature matrix to compare it against the 9500/N7Ks/N5Ks

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Thanks.

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

You can configure VPCs on the 9300 series in NX-OS mode. The big selling point for Nexus 9k series in general though is ACI mode which would generally be deployed in a fabric-based leaf and spine topology.

In a fabric we use Equal Cost Multipath and don't need a VPC setup which is designed to alleviate some limitations of spanning tree in classical Ethernet.

Have a look at the Cisco Live presentation BRKARC-2222 for a good overview of Nexus 9k design and architectures.

[CSCO10675262_2]

Hi Marvin,

Appreciate for the information. I believe the customer is in the process of moving to ACI gradually however the setup I will be making will be classical ethernet setup which is similar to VSS setup whereby the N9300 would make use of VPC to connect to catalyst 3K/6K switch. I have illustrated it below for reference:

      Catalyst 6500 Non-VSS (Core)

      |----(VPC)---|

N9300 ----- N9300   (Aggregation/Distribution)

      |----(VPC)---|

 Catalyst 3K switch (Access)

Appreciate for clarrifiying the support for VPC for Nexus 9300 as I made a search on feature navigator for "Virtual Port Channel" which only listed the N7K platforms.

Thanks.

[Marvin Rhoads]

You're welcome. Thanks for the rating.

I seldom use feature navigator and instead look to the configuration guides for the product in question. That's a more definitive answer in my opinion. Here's the Nexus 9000 configuration Guide link describing VPC setup. (It's also shown in the Cisco Live presentation I mentioned earlier.)

Plus I find Feature Navigator one of the least useful tools on Cisco's website (and I've been using cisco.com for 20 years since it was CCO).

[Krzysztof Zaleski]

I saw on that presentation that VPC is supported only to end hosts through single-homed FEXes. I cannot find it anywhere, but is direct VPC supported to end hosts without using FEX? For example, can I attach Fabric Interconnect to two 9396PQs using VPC?