Catalyst 9500-16X

[antony63593]

Hello everyone,

I am a student, and for a paper i am doing i was wondering if Catalyst 9500-16X was able to do VPN IPSEC as a client, connecting to a cloud VPN IPSEC server. 

The use case is a Collapse Core topology and i would use 2 C9500-16X as the core switches.

The question behind all that is : Am i better off using router to manage VPN tunneling, in front of the core switches.

Thanks for your help.

[balaji.bandi]

Catalyst 9500-16X - is basically a switch with more functionalities of advanced features support. But not sure what kind  of IPSEC tunnel you looking to create using this device,.

look at the features :

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-9500-series-switches/nb-06-cat9500-ser-data-sheet-cte-en.html

[antony63593]

I check that paged you link before posting. But i can't find my answer with certainty in it. If i am not mistaking Catalyst 9500-16X et a layer 3 switch, what i wanted to know is do i need a router in conjuction to it to do vpn ipsec tunneling. 

The VPN tunnel has to go from my inside network to a private cloud edge gateway that is a VPN IPSEC server.

[balaji.bandi]

For now i do not see it support the feature you looking,. may be future road-map.

[Scott Hodgdon · Accepted solution]

Antony,

We do not currently support IPSEC as the Catalyst 9000 Family. The recently launched Catalyst 9300X has this capability in hardware, but it the software to support the feature is not planned until the IOS XE 17.6 code release (target August 2021 .. subject to change).

Cheers,
Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Group