Configuring Supervisor Engine Redundancy

[Arun Kumar Thakur]

How to configure Supervisor Engine Redundancy between two different cisco 4507R and 4506E.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Are you asking about VSS on the 4500s?

[Latchum Naidu · Accepted solution]

Hi,

What do you mean exactly about "Supervisor Engine Redundancy between two different cisco 4507R and 4506E"

Are you looking for some kind of Redundancy between these two switches.
Then nothing to do with supervisor engines.
You can configure two supervisor engines in one switch like 4507R for one active and another for standby.

And for your information Supervisor engine redundancy does not provide supervisor engine load balancing or any other feature requiring two active supervisor engines. Only one supervisor engine is active. Network
services are disrupted until the standby supervisor engine takes over and the switch recovers.

Please see the below link for how to configure the supervisor engine and to make better understand of it.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst4500/12.1/12ew/configuration/guide/RPR.html#wp1097801

Please rate all the helpfull posts.
Regards,
Naidu.

[Arun Kumar Thakur]

Hi,

I have a couple of cisco 4500 series switches.

Which is the best way to get high availabilty?

[Latchum Naidu · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Again high availability can be differentiate...
Like in a single 4507R switch you can have just supervisor engine redundancy (RPR) this is just for...
Supervisor engine redundancy does not provide supervisor engine load balancing or any other feature requiring two active supervisor engines. Only one supervisor engine is active. Network services are disrupted until the standby supervisor engine takes over and the switch recovers.

So if one SUP is gone or down then the other (standby) SUP will take over the job.
And you can do Online insertion and removal (OIR) of the standby supervisor engine and Software upgrade (IOS) without having down time.

Coming to high availability between 4500 switches.
I think you have different floors and multiple 4500 switches.
What I would suggest is interms of high availability, keep two switches in HSRP mode to have a complete switch redundancy.
It is like this, say you have one switch as a default gateway for all your LAN, if this switch fails then the specific LAN can not communicate with others.
If you keep two switches in HSRP, then one switch will be active and another will be standby. So if one switch fails then the other switch will take over the job so that the LAN will never get outage.

Let me know if you need any help regarding HSRP, will provide you the solution.

Please rate all the helpfull posts.
Regards,
Naidu.

[Mandlenkosi Nkiwane]

Amarjeet,

What Latchum is trying to say is that you need to give basic information about your topology, what you want to achieve and the basic infrastructure that you have. It is hard to give a solution when you do not know the environment. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered here:

Seeing that your are using the 4506E, that has a capacity for only 1 supervisor so like Latchum said, you best bet would be to have the 4507R which has a capacity for 2 sups. See the matrix here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps4324/product_data_sheet0900aecd801792b1.html

I would presume the best way if you have 4706E, would be to have these two as your core and run a redundancy protocol of your choice, of which HSRP is the most common.

Have some vlans as primary on one and standby on the other. Most places they would have odd numbers on one and even numbers on the other....

example:

Switch 1

interface Vlanxx

description

ip address 10.x.x.2 255.255.255.0

  standby xx ip 10.x.x.1

standby xx priority 105

standby xx preempt

end

Switch 2

interface Vlanxx

description

ip address 10.x.x.3 255.255.255.0

standby xx ip 10.x.x.1

  standby xx preempt

end

Hope this helps