Chassis Aggregation

Lessons Discussion
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This topic is to discuss the following lesson:

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Hi Rene
Does Chassis aggregation also combine Chassis supervisor together, Ex, Chassis Aggrgation CPU = chassis1 cpu + chassis 2 cpu ?

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Hello Heng

Chassis aggregation will allow you to view two 6000 series switches as a single logical switch. If the supervisor goes down on one chassis, the supervisor of the other chassis will NOT take over. Each supervisor is responsible for supporting the cards on the local chassis. For this reason, we often have two supervisors per chassis in order to provide the necessary redundancy even in this case.

The major advantage of the chassis aggregation technology is, as Rene states,

“The two core switches will act as a single switch to the outside world when it comes to control plane protocols like ARP, spanning-tree, EtherChannel and routing protocols. Information like MAC addresses in the MAC address table are synchronized between the two switches.”

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz

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Hi Laz
Thank you i got it.
Sovandara Heng

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the Cisco Chassis Aggregation feature sounds like the Physcial Stacking that is called by other vendors. But as I see, Physcial Stacking can use regular ethernet interface, but cannot use the Etherchannel. And Physcial Stacking can be applied to non-chassis switch as well, not only Chassis Switch.

Will you have some introduction about MLAG? It’s very be very interesting. Looking forward to it.

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Hello Tom

There are various terms used to refer to similar technologies from different vendors. Chassis Aggregation is a term used by Cisco to refer to the architecture of using two chassis switches to act as a single aggregated switch. The actual technology that is used to achieve this architecture is Virtual Switching System or VSS. Chassis Aggregation architecture can only be achieved between chassis-type switches.

There are other aggregation technologies for both chassis and non-chassis switches. You can find out more about these at this NetworkLessons note.

As for [MLAG](Take a look at this note for more info as well.), from the point of view of Cisco, this is simply another term used to refer to the application of LAG across switches. The specific technologies that achieve this are those mentioned in the NetworkLessons note above. The terminology that each vendor uses should be understood within the context of their documentation.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz