Cisco 6880X & 6800ia Part 1

If you are thinking about deploying 6880X with some 6800ia’s then you may want to read this post in its entirety before making the final decision. I will be updating either this post or adding new posts as I come across new/relevant information.

I’ve long been a Cisco fan and one could have sold me a brick with a cisco logo on it (up until a couple of years ago) and I would have been very happy with that purchase. I would still have the same love for Cisco had I not touched the Cisco ACS (4.x & 5.x), Cisco Prime LMS 4.1 in the last few years, and the new 6880X with 6800 instant access switches. For now, let’s forget about the ACS/LMS and discuss 6880/6800ia. Being that routing and switching is one of Cisco’s core competencies; one would expect a very stable, reliable, and a feature rich (new features) product (like the 6500, Nexus 7K, ASR etc.). Unfortunately 6880X doesn’t enjoy any of those traits for now.

There is no doubt that the idea is good, you take the same model as nexus 7K/5K with fex’s and make it available outside of the datacenter environment but the execution of this plan has been subpar. With that being said, let us start with some of the “good” stuff about these boxes:

    1.      Extremely competitive price (compared to the 6500/6807 with Sup 2t).
    2.      PoE availability on the 6800 instant access switches.
    3.      Great 10g port density for the price.
    4.      Feature rich (L2/L3, full MPLS, GRE in hardware).

Please note that my assumption of “good” is heavily based on the pricing.

6880X datasheet:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-6880-x-switch/data_sheet_c78-728228.html

And now some of the “not so good” list:

1.  Max instant access switch/fex ports restricted to 1008. This means that you can only deploy 21 6800ia’s switches/fex’s per VSS pair. Per Cisco, this number will be increased to perhaps 2000 ports or more by the end of the year.
2. You can only stack up to (3) 6800ia switches.
3. You can only use FEX id’s 1-12 for now. So if you have a deployment where you need 15 single 6800ia switches….well you can only deploy 12 for now J 

Here is a complete list of restrictions and the things you can’t do on the 6800ia’s:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/15-1SY/config_guide/sup2T/15_1_sy_swcg_2T/instant_access.pdf

In the next post, I will share our 6880/6800ia deployment and the ongoing struggles with these boxes.