2960-X boot procedure

[peterpickem]

Hi,

has anyone an idea how to reduce the boot time for a 2960-X switch stack. We have measured that they need more than 5 minutes to be up and running. This is very long if we have to replace or power a switch, and we are searching for possible solutions to reduce that timeframe.

Maybe the POST can be disabled or shortened? Or any other idea or hint?

Thanks for any help with this
Peter

[m.kafka]

Most of the boot phases are required for operation and can't be skipped if you want a functional switch. Inflating the image, initializing first boot stage, decompressing and uploading microcode to the ASICs, Testing the ASICs afterwards, Initilizing IOS services, IOS has a different view of the system so test routines are run from higher level etc etc etc...

If short downtimes and fast recovery/convergence is crucial I can only think of "cutting" the stack in half and choose one of the L2 resp L3 redundancy/high availability options.