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I am looking at an upgrade from Nexus 7000 Supervisor 1's to Supervisor 2E's.

One of the differences that I am seeing is a lack of the CMP (Connectivity Managment Processor) and the CMP port. Even on the config guide for CMP, here, it says:

Note: The CMP is available only on the Supervisor 1 modules, not on the Supervisor 2 nor Supervisor 2E modules.

Currently we're utilizing those ports for OOB management, but will lose that functionality in the Sup-2E's. It isn't the end of the world, but I will need to document/work-around this in the implementation plan.

I'm assuming this was an intentional choice on Cisco's part, so does any one know why, or have any documentation with the reasoning behind this choice?

ytti
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Brett Lykins
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1 Answers1

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Friend of mine asked this question in Vegas in Cisco Live and Cisco cited lack of customer demand and thermal as main reasons.

CMP is absolutely the right solution and we need it in every vendor switch and router, only proper OOB. Server guys have had this for over decade.

So please start adding this as scoring item in your RFQ, so vendors know there is demand.

Because of the thermal comment I emailed Freescale (most routers and switches use their SOC in control-plane) and asked if they are planning to support anything like Intel vPro, which helps implement OOB functionality...

From our marketing team updates I heard something similar will be implemented in the next generation of our multicore processors, but this is under discussion yet, so I do not have any details. Ok, I will pass your suggestion to our core design team, hope they will take it into account.

There is no guarantee whatsoever that Cisco would implement OOB on Nexus 7k in future supervisors, but I thought it is interesting that Freescale is considering adding a feature like this to their silicon.

Mike Pennington
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ytti
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  • I really don't think it's necessary to speculate about Cisco's silicon partners... in fact, Cisco custom-builds a lot of their HW without outside parties – Mike Pennington Jun 11 '13 at 07:17
  • I'm not speculating, this is public information. Sup7, Sup2T, SR7750 sfm-12, MX80, EX8200, RSP720, FPC5, SRX3k, SRX1k4, MOD80, ASR9001, ACX2100 etc all have freescale control-plane (and lot lot lot more, like 90% of networking devices have freescale control-plane, and don't hide it in any way). – ytti Jun 11 '13 at 08:08
  • My point is, as freescale does not offer ethernet OOB port (like vPro). Vendor who wants to do it, like CMP, must add new hardware in the equipment, which is non-zero cost in thermal and pincount. If OTOH, SOC would have this OOB port in itself, then vendor does not need to sacrifice anything. – ytti Jun 11 '13 at 08:49
  • Your point is still speculation until you have spoken to Cisco's engineering team about the suggestion. Having worked for their engineering team, I can testify that it's easy to wave data sheets around and think that your idea is perfect... engineering realities are not so simple. Remove the speculation from your answer and I will remove my downvote – Mike Pennington Jun 11 '13 at 08:52
  • Do you feel it's more accurate now Mike? – ytti Jun 11 '13 at 09:14
  • let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/9195/discussion-between-ytti-and-mike-pennington) – ytti Jun 11 '13 at 09:22