Need Recommendations for VM environment 6509?

[Patrick.Beaven]

I'm looking to expand our ESX environment and would like to spec out a single chassis that would suppot 4-500 RSTP spanning-tree vlans and would allow for building port-channels on seperate blades with basic layer-3 routing and support multiple supervisors and powersupplies as well as blades for HA.

Can anyone give me a good idea of specifics that I should use.

Should I use a 6509 with "Dual-sups"

if so which ones. what is the maximum spanning-tree vlans for use in rapid mode? Any and all idea's are appreciated.

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Patrick,

>> what is the maximum spanning-tree vlans for use in rapid mode?

I'm not aware of any limitation of Rapid per vlan STP you should be able to run 400-500 instances.

However, you may consider MST 802.1s that could map those 500 vlans to two instances with a consistent save in cpu usage.

About your other requirements:

you can consider a C6509 with two sup720 3B or better.

Or even simply a pair of C6509 each with one supervisor.

You may be interested also in the VSS solution in this case you need specific supervisors that are VSS capable and you need only one per chassis.

see

>> The VSS requires Supervisor Engine 720 with 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports. You must use either two VS-S720-10G-3C or two VS-S720-10G-3CXL supervisor engine modules.

The two supervisor engines must match exactly.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12.2SX/configuration/guide/vss.html#wp1053927

or

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12.2SX/configuration/guide/vss.html#wp1053927

>> blades for HA ?

not sure what you mean with this

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[Patrick.Beaven]

Thank you for the information, the blades /HA question references using either dual Sup or two seperate chassis. I would prefer two different chassis but the cost factor is enough to say "Dual-Sup" please.

Can you tell me what the max rstp spanning-tree vlans value is on the sup 720's I have not been able to find it?