Introduction

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The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Virtual Switching System (VSS) 1440 takes the flagship Catalyst 6500 platform to the next level with network system virtualization.

Creating a VSS 1440

The key enabler of a VSS 1440 is the Virtual Switching Supervisor 720-10G. Any two Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches with this supervisor engine can be pooled together into a VSS 1440*. The two switches are connected with 10 GbE links called Virtual Switch Links (VSLs). Once a VSS 1440 is created it acts as a single virtual Catalyst switch delivering the following benefits:

Operational Manageability

• Two Catalyst 6500s share a single point of management, single gateway IP address, and single routing instance
• Eliminates the dependence on First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP) and Spanning Tree Protocol

Non-Stop Communications

• Delivers deterministic, sub-200 millisecond layer 2 link recovery through inter-chassis stateful failovers and the predictable resilience of Etherchannel

Scales to 1.4 Tbps

• Scales system bandwidth capacity to 1.4 Tbps by activating all available bandwidth across redundant Catalyst 6500 switches
• Up to 132 ports of 10 GbE per system

* See Virtual Switching System 1440 on the Catalyst 6500 Series White Paper for complete requirements