Uplink limitations - C9404R & Dual Supervisor Engine-1XL

[Adam Hinchliff]

Hi,

Throwing out a line to see if anyone knows the technical reason to Cisco limiting the SFP/SFP+ uplink configurations on the supervisors for a 9404.

At best when utilising a redundant supervisor you can only have 4x10g ports. 

You have 8x 10g SFP ports and 2 x 40g ports available but can only use 40%. 

Is it a software or hardware limitation?

Cheers

Adam

[pieterh]

Single supervisor

8x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports are active (ports 1 to 8) (2x 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports are disabled [ports 9 to 10])

Dual supervisors

Active supervisor: 4x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports are active (ports 1 to 4) (the other 4x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports are disabled); standby supervisor: 4x 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (ports 1 to 4) (the other 4x10 Gigabit Ethernet ports are disabled)

=> you still have 8x10G ports available, but distributed over both supervisors

My expectation is the (external) disabled ports are used for communication between the supervisors within the chassis.

same logic goes for 40G ports

source:

Table 7.          Cisco Catalyst 9400 Supervisor Engine-1XL-Y Uplink Options

[pieterh]

read this: Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Architecture White Paper

Figure 12 show the number of Switch Link Interfaces (SLI) connected from the Supervisor card to the backplane of the chassis

I guess its is a fixed number of SLI's (8) that gets split between two supervisors (4 each)