Supervisor engine in Cisco 6500

[grapevine]

I am new to Cisco 6500 series switches. Can you please let me know what are the functions of the supervisor engine and how can we configure it?

[Steve Fuller · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The Supervisor Engine (SE) is found in a number of Cisco modular based chassis e.g., Catalyst 6500, Catalyst 4500, Nexus 7000 etc., and is the module that typically has the Route Processor i.e., the router's main CPU, and so is essentially the brains of the router / switch.

The Operating System such as Cisco IOS or NX-OS runs on this module, though it may also run in some shape or form on other modules of the switch, and it is the module that has overall management and control of the device.

Any configured networking protocols such as Spanning Tree, OSPF, BGP, SNMP etc., all run on this module. To a large extent if you remove this module the switch will stop functioning.

In terms of how you configure it, that obviously depends upon what protocols and features you want to run. When you connect to a device that has a SE you would configure it in very much the same way as other Cisco router or switches that you may be familiar with such as the Catalyst 2960, Catalyst 3750 etc.

The Catalyst 6500 series platform may work very differently "under the hood" having such features as distributed switching etc., but if you've configured any fixed configuration switches such as the Catalyst 2960, 3750, etc., then in reality the configuration and operation of the Catalyst 6500 is very similar.

Take a look at the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Architecture White Paper for an in depth understanding of how the switch works, the inter-operation between the SE and I/O modules etc.

Regards

[Joseph W. Doherty · Accepted solution]

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Posting

As Steve's post has already noted, the 6500 supervisor is the (principle) "brains" for the whole chassis.  You initially configure it by attaching to the supervisor's console port.  Once you have a basic configuration, you can configure it across its other ports.

On the 6500, some line cards support DFCs, which off-load much of that card's L2/L3 processing from the supervisor.

Sup720s and the sup2T also provide a switch fabric on the supervisor card, the earlier sup2 supported an optional switch fabric line card.