Supervisor Engine - Cisco

The Cisco Supervisor Engine is the heart of many of Cisco's switches. The Supervisor Engine has evolved several times. While it is the management segment of many routers, the power of the switch is often much greater than that of the Supervisor Engine because one of the features of many switches is that dozens of the functions are accelerated by ASIC chips.

Abridged list of features:

• 802.1q VLAN
• Spanning Tree Protocol
• Ether Channel
• Jumbo Frames
• (E)IGRP, OSPF, RIP (2), Static Routing
• BGP, IS-IS
• QOS
• Some have Layer 3 & 4 Switching.

Details:

Supervisor Engine I

• 68EC040
• Chassis: 2900, 2948G, 2980G, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine II

• MIPS R4700
• Chassis: 2926, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine II+

• MIPS R4700
• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Chassis: 2926, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine III

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Max DRAM: 256MB SD
• Redundant Capable
• Netflow accelerator card

Supervisor Engine IV

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Max Flash: 64MB (supplemental Compact Flash optional)

Supervisor Engine V

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Chassis: 4500

Supervisor Engine 6

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Chassis: 4500 "E" Series

Supervisor Engine 32

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Chassis: 6000, 6500
• A low cost, reduced version of the 720
• Policy Feature Card 3b
• MSFC 2A?

Supervisor Engine 720

• Cisco Express Forwarding
• Policy Feature Card 3A, 3B, 3BXL
• Chassis: 6500, 7600

MSFC1-3

• Multi-Layer Switch Feature Card.

Supervisor Engine is a module that is installed in the Cisco Chassis-based Catalyst Switches or Routers. Supervisor engine contains nearly all the same components of a fixed Cisco Switches or Routers. These Supervisor engines come in a variety of different types with different functionalities and are installed in the Switches/Router Chassis as per requirements of the network types.

Benefits of Supervisor Engines

• By installing Latest Supervisor Engines in your existing investments (Switches and Routers) you can scale system performance and integrate next-generation services into your Networks.
• Within a single multilayer switch chassis, two supervisor modules with integrated route processors can be used to provide hardware redundancy. If an entire supervisor module fails, the other module can pick up the pieces and continue operating the switch

The supervisor engine contains the following integrated daughter cards that perform forwarding and routing and provide the protocols supported on the router.

Cisco Supervisor Engine, Sup-2T

Policy Feature Card (PFC) is the forwarding plane and does the following:

• Performs Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding.
• Enforces access control list (ACL) functions.
• Performs policing and marking for quality of service (QoS) traffic.

Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC) is the control plane and does the following:

• Performs routing for the chassis. The MSFC contains the route processor (RP) and Switch processor (SP) for the router.
• Runs Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols, such as the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and others.