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Comparison between SUP7-E Vs SUP8-E in Cisco Catalyst Switch

Today I am going to talk about the comparison between the SUP engines which includes SUP7-E and SUP8-E. Before we start with these SUP engines, first we need to understand what is the SUP engines

Supervisor engine signifies to specific modules that can be placed in a modular chassis.  If you want specific particulars, go on www.cisco.com and start looking at 4500 series or 6500 series switches.  They both require supervisor engines to work.

The backplane refers to different things depending on the hardware however it is generally a term used to quantify a interconnect between various modules or interface cards. It provides a communications channel between the 'intelligence' of the device (whether it be the supervisor engine or ASICs/processors on fixed-chassis models) and the interface ASICs and the controllers for the interfaces.  This gets more complex when you start looking at advanced hardware platforms.

Some of the facts about the SUP engines:
Switch fabric throughput - different supervisors support different amount of switch fabric connections which affects the throughput of the modules.
Some modules require certain versions of the supervisor so you need to check that. Also if you choose a certain supervisor because of it's throughput you need to make sure you choose modules that can take full advantage of that. Features like VSS is only supported on some versions of supervisor for both switches.
For the 6500/6800 series, the most current sups are the Sup720b, VS-Sup720 Sup2T and SUP6T
The Sup2T/6T offers more performance than the VS-Sup720, it also supports VSS, and its most important improvement is its much increased fabric bandwidth.  If you were buying new, you would want to Sup2T (you might also want the newer 6800 chassis too)
All the foregoing supervisors come in two variants, the regular and XL models.  The latter supports much larger route tables (useful if you dealing with Internet sized route tables, otherwise not usually needed).
For the 4500 series, the later sups are the SupV-10GE, the Sup6, Sup7 and Sup8.  Again, not sure what's Eos, but suspect the SupV-10GE might be.
As with the 6500/6800 sups, forward capacity increases with each sup, except for the 7 and 8, which are very similar except the 8 also supports wireless.

Fig 1.1- SUP7-E and SUP8-E
Comparison between SUP7-E and SUP8-E
If we talk about the main features of these SUP engines below are the basic comparisons

  • With SUP7-E, total bandwidth will be 848 Gbps while with the SUP8-E the total bandwidth will be 928 Gbps. 
  • With SUP8-E, there is a native Wireless controller support over IOS-XE while with the SUP7-E it is not supported.
  • The buffer capacity for both the SUP engines are same and the value is 32 Mbps
  • You can have the maximum number of routes with SUP7-E and SUP8-E are 256K
  • You can have the maximum entries of Security and Qos entries are 128K
  • With the SUP8-E, LISP readiness is supported within the campus while with the SUP7-E it is not supported
  • SUP7-E is a Dual Core CPU while in SUP8-E it is a Quad Core CPU.
  • You can have Blue Beacon for Serviceability in SUP8-E while it is not there in SUP7-E