IDS blade for Catalyst 6509 and IOS

[v.nastase]

Our company has two Catalyst 6509 in a redundancy topology. One of them will be upgraded with Cisco IDS blade for intrusion detection. Does the blade the capability to function with the IOS already installed on Catalyst 6509 ? All the documentation about IDS blade says that its worked only with Catalyst OS.

Thanks for your help

[marcabal]

The Catalyst 6000 running Native Cat IOS is supported for both Sup1a and Sup2 beginning with 12.1(11b)E, and is supported by all later versions on this E train like 12.1(13)E and 12.1(12c)E2.

Refer to the 12.1E Release Notes for more information:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat6000/12_1e/ol_2310.htm

NOTE: If your switches are running in a redundancy mode, then you may want to consider purchasing a second IDS Module. The module in the primary switch will only be able to monitor traffic going thorugh that switch. If the primary switch goes down and secondary takes over then the traffic will not be monitored.

Another possibility would be to use Remote Span. Place the module in the secondary switch (since the secondary will likely always be up). Then use Remote Span to send traffic from both switches to the one module. Remote SPan is first supported in Cat IOS with release 12.1(13)E.