ABSTRACT

Chapter 4 describes the different architectures of the Catalyst 6500 Series switch/routers based on the Cisco Supervisor Engines 1A and 2. These Catalyst 6500 Series architectures support a 32-Gb/s shared switching bus in addition to providing connectivity to an external 256 Gb/s crossbar switch fabric module, and Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding speeds of over 200 million packets-per-second (Mpps). The Supervisor Engine implements the control plane and data plane processing functions on a Multilayer Switching Feature Card 2 (MSFC2) module and Policy Feature Card 2 (PFC2) module, respectively.