Cisco 6880X & 6800ia Part 2

Our deployment of 6880’s and 6800ia’s is in a large healthcare system, which in hindsight was not the best move. We received the 6880’s with 15.1(2)SY1 code which had some serious issues, the biggest being SDP error messages which was causing 6800 extenders to flap constantly. Upon contacting Cisco TAC, I was told to upgrade the code to 15.1(2)SY2 (TAC engineer knew about it beforehand but there was no official documentation available….hmmm :)

Upgrading to SY2 did fix the flapping issue but caused a few other problems. Most important was that the extenders were getting stuck during the code upgrade (while pulling the new code from the parent switch). After a month long correspondence with TAC and BU engineers, we were told that “most” of these issues have been addressed in SY3 release of the code so we should upgrade to SY3. Keep in mind that every time you upgrade the 6880, the attached fex’s have to pull down the new code all over again and in the case of VSS, the fex’s reboot twice before during the process (when using eFSU). This may not be a big deal for a small setup but it is a huge problem in a 24x7 hospital environment. This problem is compounded by the fact that fex’s take 6-9 minutes to be fully operational after the reload. To make a long story short, even after the upgrade to SY3 we are still having major issues (including VSL link failure).

Here is a list of outstanding issues for 6880x (August 31, 2014):

• Random VSL Link Failure.
•  “ENTROPY_FAILURE: Unable to collect sufficient entropy”
•  SSH stops working if the active switch goes into recovery mode. The only “fix” we have found so far is to reload both shelves.
• 7-9 minutes boot time for the fex’s.
•  In case of a single homed fex, uplink interface shutdown/failure or a simple twinax/fiber failure will reboot the fex (per cisco, it’s a “security” feature but it’s an issue for me).
• ISSU/eFSU doesn’t provide much visibility into the upgrade process, leaving you wondering if it is stuck in the process (per cisco SY3 will show more “messages” during the upgrade process, I haven’t seen anything new so far).

We have received 12 of these boxes and have had 3 DOA linecards (C-6880-X-16P10G) so far. Keep in mind that you can’t interchange C-6880-X-LE-16P10G & C-6880-X-16P10G linecards as the LE is for Lite Edition (smaller hardware table) and will absolutely NOT work on the X (bigger hardware table) chassis. Installing/inserting these linecards into the chassis is tricky as well. If you don’t have it aligned exactly at the proper angle, it will get stuck and you will not be able to yank it out without messing up something else…..poorly designed linecard to say the least.

If you are not bothered by any of this stuff then you are a good candidate for deploying 6880’s J