As customer demand for increasing network scale, capacity and flexibility continues to grow, Network Engineers are assigned with the enormous task of creating new solutions that can perform a lot more for much less by leveraging the existing infrastructure to the fullest potential.
With the continued innovations on Catalyst 9000 using Cisco’s programmable IOS-XE & UADP ASIC, Cisco is proud to announce Customizable SDM (Switch Database Manager) templates feature that provides flexibility of a ‘Swiss army knife’ and scale needed to deploy Catalyst 9600 & 9500 Switches (UADP 3.0 Based) in a large Routing, MPLS or Layer 2 domain as well as help smooth migration from older Catalyst 6000 & 4500-X Switches.
Today Catalyst 9600 & 9500 Switches (UADP 3.0 Based) provide 3 Standard SDM templates as below:
- Core Template (Maximize Layer 3 Unicast & Multicast resources),
- Distribution Template (Maximize Layer 2 Unicast & Multicast resources)
- NAT (Maximize NAT & PBR resources)
(Starting IOS-XE 17.2.1 release, SD-Access template has been removed in-lieu of Customizable ASIC templates)
Standard templates provide a cookie-cutter solution for customers to deploy Switches in most common scenarios by allocating a predefined set of resources for FIB (Unicast, Multicast, MAC, MPLS/SGT… etc.) and ACL TCAM (ACL, QoS, PBR/NAT.. etc.), however for customers looking for more flexibility and scale, Customizable ASIC SDM templates can now allow to change the maximum number of Routes/MACs/MPLS labels/Netflow entries within ASIC’s shared FIB resources and maximum number of Security ACLs/QoS ACLS/PBR/NAT entries within shared ACL TCAM resources as long as it can fit in the total resources available for FIB (416K) & ACL TCAM (54K) respectively.
As illustrated in Table 1 below, e.g. Customer 1 who is looking for large Layer 2 domain would configure maximum allowed MAC addresses to 128K while keeping the Unicast, Multicast and Netflow entries to a lower numbers, similarly Customer 2 & 3 would configure maximum allowed Unicast and Netflow entries to higher values respectively while lowering the MAC addresses or MPLS entries based on their deployment needs. Any changes in the ASIC resource reallocation would require reload of the Switch to take new setting into effect.
Table 1: Examples of FIB Resources allocation for different Customers
Customized ASIC templates will be released in two phases:
In Ph 1, customization for FIB is delivered with IOS-XE 17.3.1 release, Ph 2 for customization of ACL TCAM will be available in future release of IOS-XE.
“The Custom SDM template feature on Catalyst 9000 Switches offer great customization of Routes and MAC addresses entries which enabled us to scale our deployment of Catalyst 9600 in a Centralized Wireless deployment by increasing number of MAC addresses.”
Ryan Retelle, Senior Network Analyst, UW Health Services
UADP 3.0 is Cisco’s high performance, programmable ASIC delivering 1 Bpps forwarding rate, 1.6 Tbps throughput and many critical networking & security features in hardware at line rate e.g. NAT, GRE, VxLAN, Security Group Tags, Flexible Netflow, MACSec 256 and IP packets fragmentation & reassembly without affecting Switch’s performance.
You can find out more about Cisco Catalyst 9600, C9500 and UADP 3.0 here:
References:
Catalyst 9600 Architecture White Paper
Catalyst 9500 Architecture White Paper
