Cisco VSS (virtual switching system) or Cisco vPC (virtual port channels)?

[Anon Anon]

I have spoken to a bunch of you about your plans and/or experiences using the Cisco Nexus product line. Several of those discussions included how you are using Cisco vPC (virtual port channels) and your desire to see them supported in Spectrum. I have not heard as much about Cisco VSS (virtual switching system) in the Catalyst platform so I am curious to learn who is using either of these 2 technologies, how and what kind of manageability requirements you have for them.

[Anon Anon]

Hi Everyone:

Leslie is a Senior Principal Product Manager at CA and she is looking for customer feedback in her post. Make sure you reply to her if you are interested in Cisco VSS or Cisco vPC.

Cheers!
Mary

[Anon Anon]

As an MSP, we've seen both technologies in our customers' networks. I presented this problem to one of our networking Subject Matter Experts. We had the following thoughts:

VSS:
There should be a single model representing the virtual switch. The physical switches should be represented on the interfaces tab the way modules are now. Any hardware alarms about the physical switches should be applied to these models. The virtual switch's "Asset Information" tab should contain a section for each of the physical switches so we can get fields like serial numbers per physical switch.

VPC:
On devices with virtual port channel interfaces, these interfaces should be represented on the interfaces tab, with their member physical interfaces as children. However, the physical interfaces should still appear in the list under their physical modules as well. Additionally a correlation domain should be created automatically for each virtual port channel, which includes the physical and logical interfaces from all member devices. This can be used to minimize the number of duplicate alarms. For example, only one of the VPC interfaces needs an alarm when the VPC is down due to the failure of all the physical interfaces.

[Anon Anon]

Hello

I only found this post after asking my question elsewhere...

Other Forum Post

The current issue we have with VSS, as only one switch acts as the master is being notified if the critical links between the two switches goes down. It seems to me this isn't so simple to fix as there is nothing to show this port as being different, like a stack port would be on a 3750. As stated in the post the only thing I could think of is to put something manual in the description. Or perhaps CA could offer the possibility of manual marking interfaces which aren't mapped as important so as they would still alarm even when the policy to suppress unwanted junk is applied.

With regards Nexus I think it would be a good feature if the devices placed within the same container could associate with one another, there is a Nexus variable - domain I believe, which could be used to correlate devices together. I suppose them I'm picturing some sort of logical container, which then has the two related Nexus devices within it. Then you could be given the option to map things from the container, from the single units within it, or off course relevant to the first point with regards VSS between the two devices within the logical container.

Hope this makes sense, it's pretty late here!

Thanks
Martin

[Anon Anon]

Team, some months ago I asked about this feature on Spectrum and eHealth, If I´m not wrong, this feature still isn´t certified, right ?

Thank you.

Clecimar