Brocade ICX Series (cheap & powerful 10gbE/40gbE switching)

[fohdeesha]

1 in 32 packets is an insane sampling rate, I've never seen more than 1 in 512 in production (and more commonly 1024 or 2048) - the sflow section of the manual has details, but there is a limit per second of how many sflow packets the cpu will send to a collector, I'm guessing with a requested sample rate of 1 in 32 it's dropping a ton. On top of that your polling period looks insanely long for some reason

Sflow was meant as a really lightweight sampling protocol, if you want something as heavy as 1 in 32 packets you'd probably be better off with port mirrors

 

[juey]

The high sampling rate is just for testing purposes , the traffic to and from the connected server is about ~100 pps.
In a production environment, i would set it to 256 or 512. The high polling period is because i was looking at the sflow traffic using wireshark as well, and the packets containing interface statistics were quite annoying to filter.
The cpu usage of the switch is below 5 %, while snmp is using 66 % of the cycles, so im outlining heavy cpu usage as the cause of my problem.

 

[zanechua]

Just got my ICX7150's. From what I remember somewhere I read in this thread, you no longer need to get licenses right? Because they are basically perpetual. Mine did ask me for a 45-day evaluation though. Is that normal?

 

[juey]

Sometimes, it-equipment is showing a strange behavior.....after a warm restart, i was able to see IPv4 flows.

 

[tommybackeast]

Question on Best Practices in regards to fully Testing an incoming Brocade 7250-48p Switch.

Currently I have a Brocade 6450-24p but have run out of 1GB ports.

I am a noob; and my question is what CLI commands do I use with the 7250-48p to properly test the Switch.

Is there some CLI Diagnostic command?

I will happily spend the time plugging CAT6 cable into all 48 ports one-by-one if need be. /thank you

 

[fohdeesha]

Just got my ICX7150's. From what I remember somewhere I read in this thread, you no longer need to get licenses right? Because they are basically perpetual. Mine did ask me for a 45-day evaluation though. Is that normal?

follow the update guide in the first post which covers all this

 

[fohdeesha]

The high sampling rate is just for testing purposes , the traffic to and from the connected server is about ~100 pps.
In a production environment, i would set it to 256 or 512. The high polling period is because i was looking at the sflow traffic using wireshark as well, and the packets containing interface statistics were quite annoying to filter.
The cpu usage of the switch is below 5 %, while snmp is using 66 % of the cycles, so im outlining heavy cpu usage as the cause of my problem.

I don't mean CPU utilization (I've never really seen sflow raise it significantly regardless of sample rate), but FastIron's built in sample per second limit to avoid clogging up the bus between the ASIC and the CPU. I remember it being something like 50 samples a second, but that may only apply to the ICX7xxx series, I can't remember. It's covered in fastiron-08030p-adminguide.pdf somewhere

 

[Smbaker]

I will happily spend the time plugging CAT6 cable into all 48 ports one-by-one if need be. /thank you

That's what I started out doing on my 6450-24P. One port at a time I turned on PoE and plugged in a Raspberry Pi with the PoE hat and verified it had power and connectivity. After the first bank of 12 ports, I tired of the pace and just went every 3rd or 4th port or so. It was probably overkill, but I wanted to be pretty sure the PoE wasn't flaky as I'd read a lot of posts here are flaky / damaged PoE boards.

 

[tommybackeast]

That's what I started out doing on my 6450-24P. One port at a time I turned on PoE and plugged in a Raspberry Pi with the PoE hat and verified it had power and connectivity. After the first bank of 12 ports, I tired of the pace and just went every 3rd or 4th port or so. It was probably overkill, but I wanted to be pretty sure the PoE wasn't flaky as I'd read a lot of posts here are flaky / damaged PoE boards.

I had not thought of that (turning POE on for each port to confirm POE works on each), thank you.

Might you know of a Brocade CLI command that runs diagnostics on the switch itself?

 

[tojoski]

Anyone need licenses I only have 1.9660494e+39 left

I'm just now getting into my 6450-24p, but I'm guessing this means I have no licenses installed?

ICX6450-Adva-2-143#show license
License record empty

 

[fohdeesha]

correct

 

[fohdeesha]

I had not thought of that (turning POE on for each port to confirm POE works on each), thank you.

Might you know of a Brocade CLI command that runs diagnostics on the switch itself?

it runs pretty decent diagnostics each boot, that's why if there's POE damage 99% of the time it'll spit out the PoE initialization errors people have posted in here. If you update all the firmware and it boots without complaining you're probably good

 

[tommybackeast]

it runs pretty decent diagnostics each boot, that's why if there's POE damage 99% of the time it'll spit out the PoE initialization errors people have posted in here. If you update all the firmware and it boots without complaining you're probably good

thank you - if I am reading your page correctly : for the 7250 the firmware you suggest is Brocade v8080 Firmware/Docu Zip ; SW version: 08080d ; ZIP Updated: 01-22-2019

After spending time this week reading horrible documentation; it is pleasure to read your excellent and clear documentation - thank you.

 

[Eru0194]

thank you - if I am reading your page correctly : for the 7250 the firmware you suggest is Brocade v8080 Firmware/Docu Zip ; SW version: 08080d ; ZIP Updated: 01-22-2019

After spending time this week reading horrible documentation; it is pleasure to read your excellent and clear documentation - thank you.

You should probably use the latest version of the 8080 branch, which is currently 08.0.80e.

 

[zanechua]

follow the update guide in the first post which covers all this

Yeah I already did and noticed that the license command was something along the lines of "perpetual" but it still mentions the 45-day notice when you run the command so was just wondering if it was in fact perpetual. haha.

 

[fohdeesha]

when the 45 days is up ruckus employees show up at your house, be ready

 

[zanechua]

when the 45 days is up ruckus employees show up at your house, be ready

oh snap. Gotta be careful of em. Counting down now.

 

[capn13]

I have a question about what looks like read errors on the Flash.

Screenie below is from an overnight Minicom session to a 6430-24 (as you might be able to tell from the prompt!).

Should I be worried ? Should I run an fsck at the boot prompt? Pray to @fohdeesha?

 

[Wolfstar]

Got my ICX6610-24-I in, set up, racked, and configured. Now I gotta take all the things down in order to configure my current ICX6450-24P in a mixed stack, but I'm going to hold off on that. Everyone I'm running game servers for wants to play right now so don't want to get in a fight.

I might have asked this before, but has anyone else ever done a mixed stack, with 6610 primary and 6450 in the stack? I've gone over the documentation and don't see a problem with doing it, but I'd like to run the stack, eventually, off of one of the 4x10G breakout ports, and the docs explicitly call out the front 10G links. I'm thinking this is because the breakouts aren't officially supported for anything, or something similar, but if anyone's got an idea, I'd appreciate knowing.

 

[infoMatt]

Got my ICX6610-24-I in, set up, racked, and configured. Now I gotta take all the things down in order to configure my current ICX6450-24P in a mixed stack, but I'm going to hold off on that. Everyone I'm running game servers for wants to play right now so don't want to get in a fight.

I might have asked this before, but has anyone else ever done a mixed stack, with 6610 primary and 6450 in the stack? I've gone over the documentation and don't see a problem with doing it, but I'd like to run the stack, eventually, off of one of the 4x10G breakout ports, and the docs explicitly call out the front 10G links. I'm thinking this is because the breakouts aren't officially supported for anything, or something similar, but if anyone's got an idea, I'd appreciate knowing.

Yep, @fohdeesha answered a very similar question a couple of days ago, with the correct procedure and commands to use the 40Gbreakout as the stack backbone... try look at the last few pages of this thread