VSS

When it comes to user access environment, Cisco has a compressive list of product portfolio for you to choose from including the well-known Catalyst 2K/3K/4K. That portfolio is about to expand with the introduction of Cisco Catalyst 6880-X. 6880-X is a highly scalable and manageable solution for user access offering up to 1008 (FCS) 10/100/1000 ports within a single management system when working with the Catalyst 6800ia remote linecard, while providing the same feature set as a regular 6500 that you might be longing for. This article summarizes what you need to know about this product.

Virtual Switching System (VSS) is a method to combine two physical switches into one logical switch to achieve physical redundancy, Spanning-Tree blocking elimination, and increased bandwidth. VSS was first available in Cisco 6500 but it has recently been introduced to Cisco 4500 and 4500X. This article provides configuration that will allow you to easily enable VSS on these switches.

Domain ID is one of the first parameter you come across when configuring Cisco Virtual Switching Systems (VSS). At first, it might appear that which value you choose is insignificant and you might even be able to use the same number among different VSS switch pairs. This is true as long as those VSS systems are not connected, whether directly or being Layer-2 adjacent, or the virtual MAC address is not implemented. Otherwise, you might find yourself having connectivity issue in your VSS implementation. In this article, we reveal the cause of the issue when connecting two VSS systems that have identical domain ID and offer various options to rectify. Here, we assume that you have basic knowledge of Cisco VSS.