Switching

Hi All,

   I was looking at the design guides for setting up a Full mush EX-8200 VC and noticed that in Junipers design they only have one 10 gig connection between the two Chassis.

Does this not seem wrong?  The EX-4200 have 128Gig between each member yet the 8200 which can drive Terabits of traffic are suggested to be interconnected with 10 gigs of traffic?  Am I missing something

Thanks,

i don't see why you couldn't do multiple 10G's -- I know you can between 2 chassis -- it's a question of how many line-rate 10G ports do you want to burn?

will

Two EX8200 Virtual Chassis switches are interconnected by 10 GbE links or a linkaggregation group (LAG) with up to 12 10 GbE line-rate links for exchanging customer datatraffic. These Virtual Chassis intra-connections use 10 GbE small form-factor pluggabletransceiver (SFP+) interfaces, and may be separated by distances of up to 40 km. ExternalXRE200 Routing Engines—purpose-built server-class appliances—work with the internalRouting Engines on the EX8200 line chassis, providing additional processing power andcontrol plane scalability to manage the Virtual Chassis configuration.

Does traffic go through the VCP connection into the XRE and out into another 8200?  I ask because these are only 1 gig.

no, the XREs are not in the forwarding path at all, ever.

the 1GE connections between XREs and the RE's inside the chassis are strictly for control-plane functions only -- ie updating ARP tables, routing entries, etc etc.

we had an EX8200-VC demo in our lab for a few months for customer demos, and it seemed to work pretty well.

will