Cisco Nexus 9500 Chassis

Cisco Nexus 9500 Series comes in to picture when we are talking about the Cisco ACI Leaf-spine architecture. Cisco Nexus 9500 series chassis generally used as Spine for this architecture.

If you are new to ACI then let me tell you first what ACI means, ACI means Cisco Application centric infrastructure and it tells the various features in it like automation, policy based profiles which is application set off. It can be explained in the other Blogs called as " networks-baseline " in explain which tells about the holistic view of the Cisco nexus 9500 ACI operation and the benefits of these technology.

For the Cisco ACI deployment there are various models which Cisco introduces in the Spine architecture and these models are below

  • Cisco Nexus 9504
  • Cisco Nexus 9508
  • Cisco Nexus 9516
If let me explain what these models differentiate with each other, So if i am talking about the very first model "Cisco Nexus 9504" It has 4 Spine line cards, It has 4 power supplies in the chassis, it has 6 Fabric modules availability, 2 system controllers, 2 Supervisor engines and 3 fan trays.

The other model "Cisco Nexus 9508" It has 8 spine line cards, 8 power supplies and the rest of the things are the same as the above model of Cisco nexus 9504.

The third model "Cisco Nexus 9516" It has 16 spine line cards, 10 power supplies and the rest of the things are the same as the above models Cisco Nexus 9504 and Cisco Nexus 9516 models.

Cisco Nexus Spine-Leaf Architecture 


There are other models which is act as Spine models in Cisco Nexus 9500 Chassis and these models are as below:
  • Cisco Nexus 9732C
  • Cisco Nexus 9736PQ
If i am talking about the first model Cisco Nexus 9732C, It has 32 ports of 100 Gbps support Quad SFP line cards, Cisco cloud-scale technology is enabled in this model. It can support both NS-OX and ACI modes. If you want the maximum bandwidth then we require 4 X 100 Gbps Fabric module.

The other model Cisco Nexus 9736PQ , It has 36 port of 40 Gbps SFP support line cards, Make sure you note this important point here, it can only support the ACI mode which means it can support the NS-OX mode in this model. For maximum bandwidth we require 6 Fabric modules with 40 Gbps of capacity.

This is the basic hardware information to be used in the ACI environment if you are going to deploy the Cisco Nexus 9500 Chassis as a spine model, while for the leaf it will be Cisco nexus 9300 Chassis.