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

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fohdeesha

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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ajax3712 said:
Currently have a ICX-7250-48p (much thanks to @fohdeesha for the info & guides!). Still settings things up and still learning, but I am excited to play around. I have what may be a silly question... Is it possible or even advisable to do mixed stacking with the 7250 with other models (e.g. 7150)?

When I searched the forums for "mixed stack", I only saw the 6610/6450 come up as results. Brocade docs only discuss stacking with other 7250s...
Click to expand...
no mixed model stacking on the 7250 (or any icx7xxx models that I know of)
 
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S

SuperServer

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Feb 1, 2019
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Anyone have a spare poe board to part with? Was hoping not to pay for a full switch just to get a poe board from it.
 
K

klui

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Feb 3, 2019
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kapone said:
If you look at the 6610 fan trays, each tray has 2x fans with a bit of space between them, but they flow in the same direction. Not counter rotating so to speak, and not joined together. The fan connector for the tray has enough wires for the two fans. So...

Took two trays...took off one fan from each tray, wired the second tray to the first one (extend the wires enough to go around the stacking card) and put them back in. It is...subjectively quieter than two fan trays (with 4x fans vs 2x fans in two trays) with slightly less power draw.
Click to expand...
Interesting.

If the trays are connected to each other, how do you remove them? Do you have the wires long enough so one tray can be removed and then you disconnect the headers?
 
K

kapone

Well-Known Member
May 23, 2015
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klui said:
Interesting.

If the trays are connected to each other, how do you remove them? Do you have the wires long enough so one tray can be removed and then you disconnect the headers?
Click to expand...
You don't.

If you're gonna **ck with the internals of the switch, you can't expect things to remain the same. :)
 
C

cserve

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Feb 17, 2019
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fohdeesha said:
I'm not sure if that's possible, but given that very specific error message, it looks like it's not. I'm running a bit of a mix of that and the 40g ports on my home stack, it's stacked via a trunk of 1 40g port and 1 breakout port, leaving me 2x 40gbE ports and 2x breakout ports

it's also worth noting stack traffic over the 4x 10gbE QSFP+ ports is hashed similar to standard LACP, eg by source IP / port. Meaning if you stack using only the breakout ports, you won't get single-stream speed above 10gbps between stuff connected to each stack member. so 40gbE host on switch 1 is not going to be able to do more than 10gbps for single stream stuff (eg something using only one source IP and one source port, like SMB shares etc (unless running SMB 3.0)) to a 40gbE device on switch 2, as it will get hashed to just 1 of the 10gbps stacking channels
Click to expand...
Seems like it is not possible to stack two 6610 using only the breakout ports. That is a bummer.

I was hoping I can get 4x 40Gbe out of these and not have to add another 40Gbe switch due to cost/power consumption.

The next plan is to unstack them and set up LACP (6610 does not support MCT sadly) using the breakout ports only. Still limit by 10Gbps per single stream as you mentioned but that does not affect my use case much, only need total aggregated bandwidth between nodes.

Hope this work. Is there any downside to unstacking beside ease of management? Redundancy is not a high priority since this is home lab.
 
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fohdeesha

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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cserve said:
Seems like it is not possible to stack two 6610 using only the breakout ports. That is a bummer.

I was hoping I can get 4x 40Gbe out of these and not have to add another 40Gbe switch due to cost/power consumption.

The next plan is to unstack them and set up LACP (6610 does not support MCT sadly) using the breakout ports only. Still limit by 10Gbps per single stream as you mentioned but that does not affect my use case much, only need total aggregated bandwidth between nodes.

Hope this work. Is there any downside to unstacking beside ease of management? Redundancy is not a high priority since this is home lab.
Click to expand...
that should work (running lacp), not many downsides for home use, you just lose the "single device to manage" as you point out
 
T

TechGambino

New Member
Jan 25, 2019
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TechGambino said:
I saw earlier in the thread there may have been an issue with passive DAC cables on the breakout ports. Was this confirmed?
Click to expand...
Just in case someone stumbles in here with this question again, I had no problem with passive DAC cables from fs.com and the 8x 10gb breakout ports worked fine without a license.

Thanks for the getting started guide @fohdeesha
 
N

NYCone

Member
Jun 23, 2017
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I just set up my ICX 6610 following fohdeesha's awesome guide.

It seems to be working perfectly except I'm a little confused about vlans.

I'm trying to set up multiple tagged vlans on a "trunk" with vlan ID 1 being untagged.

I watched "the death of dual-mode" video:

which says dual mode has been depreciated, but my firmware doesn't seem to be following that guideline. I'm updated to 08030t.

I can get dual-mode up on the port, but I'm curious about the new firmware death of dual mode.
 
N

NYCone

Member
Jun 23, 2017
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fohdeesha said:
read the text on the very first slide of that video
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what you're saying. I know how to configure dual mode.

To be clear, I have my switch running with dual mode - no sweat.

I thought the video was saying dual-mode is the old way of doing it, and there's a new method. I tried the new method and it failed.

My question is: Is the firmware 08030t supposed to work as the video says, or is this firmware older, and not working as the video says it should.

It's possible:
  1. I don't understand what the video says "The death of dual mode" (it may be saying dual mode is still the way to configure things and I missed that)
  2. The firmware I have is not what the video is about (Do I have a different firmware for the user in the video)
  3. The video is incorrect (perhaps it was made a long time ago, and the 08030t reinstated dual mode as the new way of doing things)
 
U

UKEE

New Member
Jan 2, 2020
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Lexington, KY
Just a quick pop-in to say that I'm joining the party as a novice. Picked up an ICX 6450-24 to get 10Gbit into the house (don't need - just want).

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread but a special thanks to @fohdeesha for not only getting it started but to post so many helpful answers.

By the way, it was posted by fohdeesha that some fool was still handing out licenses for these (need to 2 uplink ports turned to 10G instead of 1G). Still true? ;)

Thanks everyone!
 
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