Re: Cisco Vip Cards.

[Kirby Files <kfiles () bbnplanet com>]

> On Dec 30, 12:25, "Robert Davila" <robert.davila () mail usld net> wrote:
>    ^^^^^^
> Blasting in from the future.
>
> >     I'm in the process of determining weather or not to purchase several
> > VIP cards and modules for a few 7513's I have at remote locations
>
> Since you say "several", there's one amusing (or not, as the case may
> be) gotcha, which is that interface cards are reset and initialized
> sequentially.  For normal cards this is no big deal, but for VIPs the
> process is considerably more involved and time-consuming -- the VIP is
> a stand-alone system with it's own special IOS image, and it takes 2-3
> minutes to boot.  Hence, expect a 7513 fully loaded with VIPs to spend
> half an hour booting before it starts doing anything useful.  Cisco is
> apparently working on parallel booting, but AFAIK it isn't there yet.

Hogwash!  While I'm not a complete fan of the Cisco boot process (in
particular, the apparent redundancy of much of the bootstrap process),
it takes nothing like 30 minutes to load a fully loaded box.  A number
of our 7513's are populated with only VIP2-40s (in all 11 slots), and
take on the order or ~5 minutes to load.  The most time-intensive
operation is decompressing the images (which themselves are getting a
bit silly in size, especially the -boot images).

Downloading microcode to VIP2 processors takes relatively little time.


----
Kirby Files
Network Engineer 
GTE Internetworking
kfiles () bbnplanet com