Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches are the next-generation purpose-built 40/100G modular core/aggregation platform, providing resiliency at scale with the industry’s most comprehensive security while allowing the business to grow at a low total operational cost. The Cisco Catalyst 9606R is a 6-slot 8RU chassis ready to support a wired switching capacity of up to 25.6 Tbps, with up to 6.4 Tbps of bandwidth per slot. Some salient features of the Cisco Catalyst 9606R chassis are: - Supports a nonblocking 40/100G Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP+, QSFP28) line card - Supports a line-rate 1/10/25G SFP and Enhanced SFP (SFP, SFP+, SFP28) line card - Optimized for the enterprise with efficient side-to-side airflow - Front accessibility for all removable components, such as the supervisor, line cards, power supply, and fan tray - Dual accessible fan tray for easy removal - Embedded RFID tag for easy asset tracking

1. Q&A
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TechWiseTV Workshop: Cisco Catalyst 9600: Deep
Dive and Design Considerations
September 5, 2019
Q. Do you know how that compares to the 9400 Series?
A. The Cisco® Catalyst® 9400 Series supports 13,000 logical ports w ith Per-VLAN Spanning Tree (PVST) using
Supervisor Engine 1.
Q. Will these slides be available for download?
A. You w illreceive a thank-you email w ith links to the recording and slides.
Q. What was that about 1G being on the roadmap?
A. The FCS release does not support 1G.
Q. I saw the 9200 Series switches earlier. Do you recommend using the 9200 Series as core switches for a
small environment? If not, then why not?
A. The 9200 Series are entry-level access sw itches suited for small environments. You should look at the 9300
Series, w hich has Gigabit Ethernet, Multigigabit, and fiber models.
Q. Can the 9600 Series can be configured like a spine or leaf?
A. The 9600 Series does support Ethernet VPN (EVPN).
Q. Since the 9600 Series is supposed to replace the 6800 Series, how many active SPT logical ports are
there? The 6500 Series has 6000 per line card when in MST.
A. The number of verified logical ports for PVST is 16,000 today w ith Supervisor Engine 1. With Multiple Spanning
Tree (MST), the verified number of logical ports is 65,000. It is not limited per line card, it is all per system.
Q. How about 50G port capability?
A. We have a 50G, 25G, and 10G capable line card already available. The current Supervisor Engine 1 cannot
drive 50G, but this w ill be available w ith a future supervisor (Supervisor Engine 2). This session w ill cover it later.
Q. Can the 9600 Series be used as IPN switches between two Cisco ACI® Pods?
A. Yes, w ith our recently shipped softw are release (16.12.1), w hich supports bidirectional Protocol Independent
Multicast (PIM Bidir), the 9600 Series can be used as an Inter-Pod Netw ork (IPN) betw een tw o Cisco ACI Pods.

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Q. Thanks again. Kenny. Would that correspond to, let’s say, 50k in MST?
A. Hi Anders, it is 64K for MST on C9400 as w ell. [C9600 is 64K].
Q. What chipset is UADP 3.0 built on? Jericho?
A. No. UADP is Cisco's chip, w hereas Jericho is from Broadcom.
Q. What was that about 1G being on the Roadmap?
A. 1G w illbe suported in Nov IOS0-XE release.
Q. Great presentation. Will you be making these slides available afterwards?
A. You w illreceive a thank you email w ith links to recording and slides.
Q. Will the line cards support 1/10Gig Copper SFP/SFP+?
A. Copper optic support is coming in a future release.
Q. I saw the 9200 switches earlier. Do you recommend we use the 9200 switches as core switches for a
small environment? If not, then why not?
A. We do not recommend using 9200 sw itches for your core, as it has been architected / designed for small and
simple branch only.
Q. The NetFlow capacity in current SUP1 is much lower than, let’s say, the SUP6 on Cat6800. Will this be
solved in future Cat9600 Supervisors?
A. Please note that C6K had tw o flavors, XL and non-XL. The C9600 today is comparable to the non-XL version.
We have plans to help transition the XL versions as w ell.
Q. Would 150 users be considered a small environment?
A. Yes, but also depends on w hat else (apps/traffic, volume...) is running in that environment.
Q. How soon is the next version of the SUP (SUP 2?) expected to come out?
A. It is targeted for 2HCY20.
Q. When would it make sense to us a Cat9600 as a WLAN controller?
A. It is not supported yet.
Q. So this switch does NOT support the spine/leaf design?
A. What Kenny is show ing is the traditional three-layer design. We do support Spine / Leaf design.
Q. Cisco 9600 can be configured like a Spine or leaf?
A. Ideally you w ould w ant to use 9600 as the spine.
Q. When did the C9600 hit the market? And have there been revisions to the SUP1 since its inception?
A. We introduced C9600 earlier this year. There have been no revisions to SUP1.