How to measure 6509 and FWSM Utilization?

[nguyenvinht]

My customer has two 6509s with Sup 720 and two FWSMs running Active/Standby. How do I measure the performance and capacity baseline of the 6509s and FWSMs?

What parameters can I use?

Thanks.

Vinh

[ciscograyaw]

Your topic said utilization, but your question is asking capacity, so its a little confusing.

The FWSM has a couple commands that you can use to see how loaded it is - 'show cpu' and 'show traffic' will give you overviews of how hard its working and how much traffic its pushing through.

Capacity is going to vary based on configs and a number of other variables, however. That being said, the Sup 720 and FWSMs are fairly beefy devices.

[nguyenvinht]

Thanks. Sorry for the confusion. I was looking for any infor that I can get out of these devices, utilization, performance, capacity, throughput, etc. If you have any ideas, please help me out.

It said the total capacity, throughput for Sup 720 in a chassis is 720 Gbps. The throughput of the FWSM is 5 Gbps. What are the commands or paramaters that I can use to measure the utilization of the Sup and FWSM?

Thanks for helping me out.

vnt

[ciscograyaw]

The throughput for an entire chassis, under absolutely perfect conditions, with a Sup720 and nothing but CEF720 blades, is 720 Gbps.

Generally speaking, unless you have something extreme going on, you don't need to worry about the backplane/supervisor throughput - it should be more than sufficient (we run 6509s with multiple 10-gig line cards and other items and don't even come close). You can view what cards are using what bus with 'show platform hardware capacity system' and averages on utilitization under 'show platform hardware capacity fabric'. The latter is handy - it keeps a record of not only what the peak usage percentage was, but when it happened, along with what those values are presently.

Most modules are not over-subscribed on bus bandwidth, but some are (notably 8 and 16 port 10 gig cards).

Those commands will also show you the max utilization of the 8-gigabit channel to the FWSM. While the FWSM's rated throughput is 5 Gbps, its connection to the bus is 8. You can again use that to see current and peak usage.

These two commands are on the Sup720 - the 2 I gave earlier are to be run on the FWSM and will give a little more information from its perspective.

[nguyenvinht]

Do these two commands show the total utilization of all ports on each line card as well?

vnt

[ciscograyaw]

They will show how much backplane (bus) is used by the cards.

'show int summary' will show you statistics over the past 5 minutes for bytes and packets in and out, but 5 minutes is as far back as statistics inside IOS go for rates - for anything more you'll need to have something outside watching packet counters and making reports (there are a large number of packages that will do this - commercial ones include Solarwinds and Intermapper, free ones include MRTG).