Proper Switch for heavy Q-in-Q tunneling

[broow]

We have a 3750 setup to handling our QinQ tunnels between out network and the Vendor to reach out remote sites.  We have 4 remotes sites working fine as of now.  We will be adding more sites in the near future.  I am concerned that adding more sites to the 3750 will begin to over load the switch.  It peaks at 70 CPU utilization now.  Is there a better, more powerful switch that supports QinQ that I can upgrade to?  Like maybe the 4500 series or even the 6500.  We plan on adding about 6 more sites in the future.

[Marvin Rhoads]

The more robust platform for this type of service would be something like the ME 3400E series that's targeted to carriers for use in residential and small business cases where they deliver Metro Ethernet (ME) services. That's what they use to hand off multiple customer ports with services such as QinQ.

On the other hand, you'd also probably be just fine with the current generation Catalyst 3k - like the 3850. It'd more likely look like your current switches from a configuration and management point of view.

[broow]

Thanks for the response, I believe for simplicity sake, I could add another 3750 switch and add the new tunnels to it.  Think that should work?  You can see that cpu went up after adding the 4th site to the 3750 switch we have in service now.  It was added around Dec 10th.

[Reuben Farrelly]

I suspect there's something else going wrong if you're seeing CPU utilisation like this.  Unless traffic is being punted out of hardware and processed by the CPU (which is bad...and in itself deserves attention) then 70% cpu is way too high.

A 3560/3650/3750/3850 should all be able to do this function in hardware and without impacting CPU.

You might also want to look at the ME3600X platform.  This is a service provider switch but it kicks serious butt in things like q-in-q termination, handles overlapping VLANs between ports easily, allows you to terminate q-in-q interfaces on the switch itself, scales well, and is reasonably priced.  You won't need to use it's MPLS capability but the service-instance and bridge domain capability will make your life much easier and make you wonder how you ever did without it.