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

[lemann_ss]

Hi all,

I have a Ruckus ICX7150-24P-4X1G POE 24-port switch. I activated the 10G SFP+ ports using:

license install perpetual 1 2x10g

After accepting the EULA, I got the standard message:

"The evaluation license period is 45 days after which you must purchase a license should you continue using the software."

I've seen older posts on this forum suggesting that the licensed functionality keeps working even after the 45-day trial expires, without a purchased license being installed - i.e. there's no hard technical enforcement, just the contractual obligation from the EULA.

Could someone confirm:

1. Is this still accurate on current FastIron releases, or has this changed in recent versions?
2. Does this behavior depend on the firmware/software version (e.g. 08.0.9x vs 09.0.x vs 10.0.x)?

Thanks in advance!

 

[i386]

1) yes
2) no (IT was introduced in one of the 08 branches)

 

[lemann_ss]

1) yes
2) no (IT was introduced in one of the 08 branches)

Thanks for confirming!

One follow-up question then: does that mean stacking multiple switches together would also keep working past the 45-day trial? As far as I know, stacking doesn't work without the 10G ports being active , so I'm assuming the same honor-based behavior would apply there as well

 

[kpfleming]

Yes, all of the licenses are perpetual and on the honor system in the ICX7xxx series.

 

[monotux]

I have an 6450-24p in my homelab, and I would like to programmatically configure it. I've tested the Ansible community.network module before, but that has since been deprecated.

What are people using to configure these old switches? Any advice?

 

[hmw]

Yes, all of the licenses are perpetual and on the honor system in the ICX7xxx series.

Is that true for the ICX8xxx series as well ?

 

[Skinny Skeeve]

My switches (all of them) get their OOB/management IPs from Technitium over DHCP. I have a single "jumpbox" that has access to this OOB network and it...just works?

How much infrastructure do you run that way? I like the idea of managing IP configuration through DHCP, but that adds obvious dependencies upon DHCP.

 

[kapone]

How much infrastructure do you run that way? I like the idea of managing IP configuration through DHCP, but that adds obvious dependencies upon DHCP.

Quite a bit. But...while that setup worked fine, I'm transitioning everything to static IPs (including IPMI) for many different reasons. The biggest one is IaC...the entire infrastructure (excluding firewalls and switches. These are just a pain to automate) is being turned into Ansible playbooks that ensure that it stays consistent and can be rebuilt in a heartbeat.

This kinda necessitated a static IP configuration across everything. I don't even have a DHCP server on the main network anymore...it's just there on the provisioning vlan, where bare metal machines get configured.

With Ansible configuring everything (including bare metal installation, networking, storage, containers, virtual machines, backup...) the following become true:

• Hardware and nodes are disposable commodities.
• No need for mirrored boot disks etc. The entire node can be rebuilt with the push of a button in ~5-7 minutes. And with clustering, a node going down is no big deal.
• I actually don't even use Proxmox HA anymore. My architecture has essentially evolved into pure Docker conatiners, with no VMs, except for the firewalls (and they have their own HA, so Proxmox doesn't need to do anything). My Proxmox cluster essentially runs multiple Dockers Swarms in LXCs. Each LXC is on a particular network segment (like dev, staging, prod etc) and runs docker/swarm. So, for each environment I essentially have a bunch of Docker hosts in a swarm. The swarm runs multiple copies of a few conatiners (that are needed), and restarts a container on a different node if one node goes down.
• All of the above is code driven with Ansible.
• "I" am no longer a SPOF. Ansible playbooks are self documenting, so any half decent tech person can fire up SSH and run the playbooks to recreate everything. It's also much easier to manage when I'm traveling. I no longer need to RDP into something or access a GUI. Mobile device-->VPN-->SSH into the Ansible control node and go.

 

[Jelmer]

Is that true for the ICX8xxx series as well ?

Yes