[14259] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Cisco Vip Cards.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kirby Files)
Mon Dec 15 21:32:31 1997
To: Per Gregers Bilse <pgb@eu.net>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 17:26:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Kirby Files <kfiles@bbnplanet.com>
Cc: rad@mail.usld.net, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199712122122.AA07941@jotun.EU.net> from "Per Gregers Bilse" at Dec 12, 97 10:22:48 pm
>
> On Dec 30, 12:25, "Robert Davila" <robert.davila@mail.usld.net> wrote:
> ^^^^^^
> Blasting in from the future.
>
> > I'm in the process of determining weather or not to purchase several
> > VIP cards and modules for a few 7513's I have at remote locations
>
> Since you say "several", there's one amusing (or not, as the case may
> be) gotcha, which is that interface cards are reset and initialized
> sequentially. For normal cards this is no big deal, but for VIPs the
> process is considerably more involved and time-consuming -- the VIP is
> a stand-alone system with it's own special IOS image, and it takes 2-3
> minutes to boot. Hence, expect a 7513 fully loaded with VIPs to spend
> half an hour booting before it starts doing anything useful. Cisco is
> apparently working on parallel booting, but AFAIK it isn't there yet.
Hogwash! While I'm not a complete fan of the Cisco boot process (in
particular, the apparent redundancy of much of the bootstrap process),
it takes nothing like 30 minutes to load a fully loaded box. A number
of our 7513's are populated with only VIP2-40s (in all 11 slots), and
take on the order or ~5 minutes to load. The most time-intensive
operation is decompressing the images (which themselves are getting a
bit silly in size, especially the -boot images).
Downloading microcode to VIP2 processors takes relatively little time.
----
Kirby Files
Network Engineer
GTE Internetworking
kfiles@bbnplanet.com
