This is the retired Shane Killen personal blog, an IT technical blog about configs and topics related to the Network and Security Engineer working with Cisco, Brocade, Check Point, and Palo Alto and Sonicwall. I hope this blog serves you well. -- May The Lord bless you and keep you. May He shine His face upon you, and bring you peace.
While 8XXX code may be the most stable for the ICX be prepared for fits and fails getting it there. I work in an environment where we have stacked ICXs ( 6 deep in some cases) and when we aggregated and lagged the uplinks on 7 code and tried to move to 8 it was, in a word, horrific. After hours of debugging , failing back and redos they finally worked as expected - so we thought ... turned out we had a set of lags that worked partially afterward and needed re-defined and reset to resolve it. All told, it took our regional SE about 8 hours total to move from 7 to 8 fully. I am certified in the "C brand" and remotely supported 100s of L2 and L3 switches in that brand and code upgrades were painless and almost fool proof. Watching these ICXs upgrade to new code was simply aweful and time consuming. I will say, now that they are on 8 they are working fine - just don't expect to do very many changes to them, especially interesting alterations like RSTP without issue. Sorry to say you get what you pay for in the hardware game.
Wow man. Sounds like you had a bad experience. I've never had any kind of bad issues like you described here. But, I do know there are some differences in the 7.x and 8.x codes, even with the lag configurations. I wouldn't chalk that up to hardware though. I've seen issues with Brocade, Cisco, Dell, etc. No manufacturer is perfect for sure.
You know what, no manufacturers are perfect but the fact that upgrading a stack of ICX6610 takes the WHOLE entire stack down, is unacceptable in this day and age. I'm able to do a firmware upgrade on a Juniper EX4200 stack and the routing NEVER stops. Only a switch at a time goes down while routing is taken over by the other switches in the stack with no core network downtime.
Sorry for the rant but I'm more than tired of the this. You get what you pay for is certainly valid when talking about Brocade and sadly, the pencil pushers our there never see the limitations that comes with it.
You get what you pay for is very VERY true when it comes to Brocade.
While 8XXX code may be the most stable for the ICX be prepared for fits and fails getting it there. I work in an environment where we have stacked ICXs ( 6 deep in some cases) and when we aggregated and lagged the uplinks on 7 code and tried to move to 8 it was, in a word, horrific. After hours of debugging , failing back and redos they finally worked as expected - so we thought ... turned out we had a set of lags that worked partially afterward and needed re-defined and reset to resolve it. All told, it took our regional SE about 8 hours total to move from 7 to 8 fully. I am certified in the "C brand" and remotely supported 100s of L2 and L3 switches in that brand and code upgrades were painless and almost fool proof. Watching these ICXs upgrade to new code was simply aweful and time consuming. I will say, now that they are on 8 they are working fine - just don't expect to do very many changes to them, especially interesting alterations like RSTP without issue. Sorry to say you get what you pay for in the hardware game.
ReplyDeleteWow man. Sounds like you had a bad experience. I've never had any kind of bad issues like you described here. But, I do know there are some differences in the 7.x and 8.x codes, even with the lag configurations. I wouldn't chalk that up to hardware though. I've seen issues with Brocade, Cisco, Dell, etc. No manufacturer is perfect for sure.
DeleteYou know what, no manufacturers are perfect but the fact that upgrading a stack of ICX6610 takes the WHOLE entire stack down, is unacceptable in this day and age. I'm able to do a firmware upgrade on a Juniper EX4200 stack and the routing NEVER stops. Only a switch at a time goes down while routing is taken over by the other switches in the stack with no core network downtime.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the rant but I'm more than tired of the this. You get what you pay for is certainly valid when talking about Brocade and sadly, the pencil pushers our there never see the limitations that comes with it.
You get what you pay for is very VERY true when it comes to Brocade.