No more hiding in the server room

Force10 and CISCO Interoperability

Its my first post and like all first posts I wish to leach off others knowledge. I was wondering if anyone had any experience of mixing Force10 switches into a CISCO enviroment. Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of problems with things like LACP or anything that might not quite mesh together. I'm interested as I was looking at these switches and their price does not seem to be to bad, and lead times seem to be a lot better for kit (ahh! the pressure from those above). I spoke to a tech who assures me that FTOS is 95-98% IOS at the CLI. Any comments much appreciated and I will try and contribute a bit more.

Cheers,

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Permalink Reply by Travis on May 2, 2010 at 8:03am

Well we bought them anyway and I have been given the task to install them. They seem to be based on NetBSD (FTOS) as the core OS which in my opinion is no bad thing. They are very similar at the command line to Cisco, so most Cisco admin will be reasonably comfortable at the CLI. The switches require more config even for layer 2 functions such as PoE which is turned on by default for catalyst 3750, this probably a good thing makes you think a little more about your config. One problem if you have all your traffic and management all bundled together in the default vlan (I know, bad practice but something I will addressing in the future even more so now) and using some layer 3 functions things can get a bit sticky. You can use trunking and pull tagged traffic off by assigning tagged vlans to interfaces on the force 10 except vlan 1 which you need to tag on the cisco side as force 10 only accepts tagged traffic and cisco does not tag vlan 1 by default. So far I haven't finished the install but thought I would give an update for others.

Cheers,