Cisco Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E Feature Highlights
– Centralized 280-Gbps switching capacity with 225 millions of packets per second (Mpps) of throughput
– IP routing protocols: EIGRP, OSPF, Routing Information Protocol (RIP), and RIPv2
– BGP Version 4 (BGPv4) and Multicast Border Gateway Protocol (MBGP)
– Virtual Route Forwarding-Lite (VRF-Lite)
– IPv6 support in hardware, providing line-rate forwarding for IPv6 packets
The Supervisor Engine 6L-E delivers 24 Gbps per slot of switching capacity when deployed with the E-Series line
cards in a Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series chassis. You can mix and match classic line cards and E-Series line cards
within a Cisco Catalyst 4500 E-Series chassis with no performance degradation. When you deploy the Cisco
Catalyst Supervisor Engine 6L-E with classic line cards, all of the new features except the 24-Gbps per-slot
switching capacity are inherited. The Cisco Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engine 6L-E is also compatible with classic
Cisco Catalyst 4500 line cards, chassis (3-, 6-, and 7-slot), and power supplies, providing full investment
protection.
The Cisco Catalyst Supervisor Engine 6L-E also provides flexibility and an easy migration path to 10 Gigabit
Ethernet uplinks with dual-purpose X2 slots that can accommodate wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet optics or Cisco
TwinGig Converter Modules, enabling Gigabit Ethernet SFP optics.
The Cisco TwinGig Converter Module, which ships standard with the Supervisor Engine 6L-E (unless you order 10
Gigabit Ethernet optics on the configuration tool), converts a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet X2 interface into two
Gigabit Ethernet port slots that can be populated with appropriate SFP optics, providing a total of four Gigabit
Ethernet uplinks if used in both X2 interface slots. With the flexibility offered by the Cisco TwinGig Converter
Module, you can initially use the gigabit uplinks, and then, as your business demands change, you can simply
remove the Cisco TwinGig Converter Module and insert 10 Gigabit Ethernet X2 optics to provide full line-rate 10
Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The ability to support both Gigabit Ethernet uplinks and 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks on a
single supervisor engine further demonstrates the flexibility and the investment protection of the Cisco Catalyst
4500 Series.
The capabilities and investment protection provided by the Supervisor Engine 6L-E facilitate not only adequate
scalability for today’s network access requirements but also investment protection of your network components by
providing significant software functions for future deployments.
– Flexibility to operate at 6 or 24 Gbps per line-card slot
– Ability to mix and match 6-Gbps classic and 24-Gbps E-Series line cards with no performance degradation
– Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks (X2 optics)
– Cisco TwinGig Converter Modules that enable flexibility for up to four Gigabit Ethernet (Small Form-Factor
Pluggable [SFP]) uplinks in the X2 optic slots
– Low latency
– Hardware forwarding entries: 57,000
– Dynamic hardware forwarding table allocations for ease of IPv4-to-IPv6 migration
– Quality-of-service (QoS) services hardware entries: 16,000 per direction
– Advanced QoS support with up to eight queues per port, dynamic queue sizing, and hierarchical policing to
provide flexibility and control
– Security services entries: 16,000 per direction
– Support for the following software packages: LAN Base, IP Base, and Enterprise Services (Enterprise
Services support introduced with Cisco IOS Software Release 12.2(53)SG2)