Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches

We used the advanced customization features to create a VSS between our dual Catalyst 6880s. This provided streamlined administration and monitoring.

We have integrated the Catalyst 6800 switches with Cisco Prime Infrastructure for centralized management of the network infrastructure.

We have benefitted from the advanced manageability, as we are not a huge shop with not many network engineers. These are very easy to manage because it's essentially the same as managing any other Cisco device. We enjoy the number of ports that are available and how well the operating system is laid out.

Our Cisco 6800 Campus Core infrastructure, as other infrastructural components is centrally managed by NMS, which in our case is Solar Winds. We are planning deployment of DNA Assurance components that will give us greater functionality and integration with Cisco NMS features.

We don't have a lot of customization going on besides regular config items. But manageability wise it's useful to connect our 6800 to a main network management system like Solarwinds and using that to save, backup, and push configs and even firmware or patch updates out with just a few clicks.

Customization in the form of configuring our specific network types, names, access, and authorization are all positives. Not sure what else customization can happen with a switch. Manageability is massive, however. That is done with our Cisco management system and we can fully control everything about 6800 with ease and speed!

We have customized our interfaces to give us detailed info on what each does while working in the config. That is a great feature. Also management from a centralized network application has made managing it a breeze. It can also be managed from Cisco's own software line up and we've used those as well.

We are using the simple management way for any switch which is the CLI management using an SSH IT console. Hopefully we can use more advanced management tools in the future.

Currently in the implementation, this programmability has not been present.

Since our switches work with VSS, we have been working uninterrupted and can run maintenance tasks without interrupting our services.

I love the out of band management option provided with the supervisor modules.

Well, at least I have not seen that customization, they basically do what they were made to do. Regarding manageability, it is OK, a CLI would be the best option to manage them.

Manageability is our primary reason for buying catalyst switches

We do use some 3rd party products to help manage our catalyst infrastructure. Those products work well based on the standard cli and snmp standards. We will be looking to use new configuration methods in the future to help with automation.

The manageability is the crucial reason these switches are better than others. Instead of touching 50 switches per building we only login to one. When a tech needs to troubleshoot a switch or client at a site, they no longer have to jump from switch to switch searching for the mac address of the client as it all comes back to the central 6880.