TL;DR: no real question, just WTF, Cisco?
Ok, first off, WTF Cisco?
We bought some 9606 chassis with some C9600X-SUP-2s and put a VRF on them to support our 2-pod ACI IPN. ACI requires Bidirectional PIM to support BUM traffic over the IPN. The switches happily took the configuration, negotiated PIM neighborships and seem to work fine.
Later, for unrelated reasons, we found that the Cisco Catalyst 9600 Datasheet reports that BIDIR-PIM is unsupported with the ~sup2 control board, but there is a caveat. There is a footnote that says this:
2āÆ C9600X models: feature is not available at FCS, but it is hardware capable.
Ok. I guess I can buy that Cisco wanted to get the board out the door and maybe hadn't validated that feature yet, but it's most certainly on the roadmap. In talking with our account reps, we are told that there are no plans to support BIDIR-PIM on the C9600X-SUP-2s; it's not even on the roadmap.
So, I reiterate: WTF, Cisco???
If Cisco truly is not going to validate/support that feature, they should remove that footnote. There's no other way to interpret that other than there are plans to support that in the future. It is literally a trivial matter to update the documentation to accurately reflect the capabilities of ANY piece of hardware. Second, they should update IOS-XE to remove that as available configuration for C9600X-SUP-2s, though I realize there are a fair number of interdependencies that might prevent that.
So, we are left with running a feature that seems to work but is officially unsupported, and that is not a great situation (though I, personally, am willing to Leeroy Jenkins that). Or we have to unspin our IPN and build multisite, as suggested by the technical resource at Cisco. This is asinine; our design goals are to have a single region with multiple DCs/pods and simplified management, not multiple regions, which is the box I put multisite in.
Anyone have the Catalyst 9600 line's product manager info? I'd like to send a strongly worded email.
</rant>
