Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q Switches — READ ME FIRST

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Updated:July 18, 2016

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Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q Switches — READ ME FIRST

Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q Switches — READ ME FIRST

The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches run the following Cisco Nexus 9000 Series software: Cisco NX-OS Releases 7.0(3)IX1(2) and 7.0(3)IX1(2a) as well as later releases starting with 7.0(3)I3(1). Because this software is based off of the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switch software, the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches share many of the same user documents with the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches.

This document lists the user documentation that applies to the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches and explains any software differences between these devices and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches. To find a document online, use one of the links in this document.


Note

Unless otherwise noted, the user documentation for the Cisco Nexus 3000 Series and 3100 Series switches does not apply to the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches.

General Software Differences

The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches and the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches run the same software and support most of the same features. The general software differences between the two platforms are as follows:

  • MIB support list—The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches support the same MIBs as the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches, but they use different MIB support lists. The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q MIB support lists are available at the following FTP sites: Cisco Nexus 3232C MIB Support List and Cisco Nexus 3264Q MIB Support List.

  • Software license—The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches use the N3K-LAN1K9 software license rather than the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series software license. For details, see the Cisco NX-OS Licensing Guide.

  • Switching modes—For Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)IX1(2a), 7.0(3)I3(1), and later releases, store-and-forward switching mode is the default for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches, and cut-through switching cannot be enabled on these devices.

  • Unicast routing modes—The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches support the same routing modes as the Cisco Nexus 9300 Series switches: the default system routing mode and the ALPM routing mode. For more information on these modes, see the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Unicast Routing Configuration Guide, Release 7.x.

  • Verified scalability numbers—The Cisco Nexus 3232C switch, the Cisco Nexus 3264Q switch, and the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches have been verified for use with different scalability limits. See the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q NX-OS Verified Scalability Guide for your release for the verified limits.

New Features and Enhancements

This section lists the features and enhancements that are supported for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches but not for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches.

Control Plane Policing (CoPP)

The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches use two TCAM regions (CoPP and CoPP system) to implement CoPP. Both regions are carved by default and are mandatory.

The CoPP region is used to classify the CoPP packets and derive a class ID corresponding to each CoPP queue.

The CoPP system region is used to derive the actual CPU queue based on the class ID derived from the CoPP region.

Dynamic Breakout Support

The Cisco Nexus 3232C switch supports breakout interfaces. The interface breakout module module port range map {10g-4x | 25g-4x | 50g-2x} command splits each of the switch's 40G ports into four 10G ports (breakout ports) or each of the switch's 100G ports into four 25G ports or two 50G ports. The port range is from 1 to 32.


Note

The interface breakout module module command configures the default map of 10g-4x. However, Cisco recommends using the interface breakout module module port range map {10g-4x | 25g-4x | 50g-2x} command to explicitly specify the port range and map.


Note

A 100G copper cable also supports the 10g-4x breakout mode, but a 100G fiber cable does not. If the requested breakout is not supported by the cable in place, an error message appears.

The Cisco Nexus 3264Q switch does not support breakout interfaces in Cisco NX-OS Releases 7.0(3)IX1(2) and 7.0(3)IX1(2a). Beginning with Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I3(1), the 3264Q switch supports breakout with the 10G-2x interface.

Micro-Burst Monitoring

The micro-burst monitoring feature, which is introduced in Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I3(1), allows you to monitor traffic to detect unexpected data bursts within microseconds. It can also be used to detect traffic in the network that is at risk for data loss and network congestion.

For more information, see the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Quality of Service Configuration Guide.

OpenFlow

The Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches support both OpenFlow and OpenFlow Lite.

OpenFlow and OpenFlow Lite support the same actions. However, the tuple match capabilities vary between OpenFlow and OpenFlow Lite.

Match Capability

OpenFlow

OpenFlow Lite

Ethernet type

Supported

Supported

VLAN ID

Supported

Supported

VLAN priority

Supported

Not supported

IP protocol

Supported

Supported

IPv4 source address

Supported

Supported

IPv4 destination address

Supported

Supported

Source port

Supported

Not supported

Destination port

Supported

Not supported

In port (virtual or physical)

Supported

Supported

Wildcard all matches

Supported

Supported

The following commands can be used to configure the ACL TCAM region size for OpenFlow and OpenFlow Lite:

  • hardware access-list tcam region openflow tcam-size

  • hardware access-list tcam region openflow-lite tcam-size

For more information on OpenFlow, see the Cisco Plug-In for OpenFlow Configuration Guide.

Quality of Service (QoS)

The buffer size of the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches is 4 MB per XPE (with four XPEs) as compared to the 12 MB buffer size of the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches. The following CLI commands are available to reduce overall priority flow control (PFC) buffer reservation and improve PFC scalability:

  • pause buffer-size 60000 pause-threshold 30000 resume-threshold 10000—Creates the buffer reservation for the PFC class. For example:

    • The pause is generated once the buffer occupancy reaches PG_MIN.

    • PG_HDRM is the headroom buffer to absorb incoming packets until the sender stops the transmission.

    • PG_MIN + PG_HDRM is the total reservation per PFC class.

  • [no] hardware qos ing-pg-no-min—Reduces the default ingress priority group minimum (PG_MIN) to three MTUs, which reduces the total reservation by half. The default is disabled.

  • [no] hardware qos ing-pg-hdrm-reserve percent percent-value—Configures the PFC headroom pool size as a percentage. The range is from 20 to 100, and the default is 100.

    The PFC headroom pool is the aggregated shared PFC reservation in each XPE for all of its ingress ports. Its size can be smaller than the sum of the individual ingress priority group headroom pool (PG_HDRM) reservations because the probability is very low that pause packets will be transmitted at the same time by a large number of PFC ports.

    For each new PFC port, the headroom pool size is increased by the port reservation, up to the maximum size allowed by the hardware. Once the maximum size is reached, the headroom pool stops growing, but new PFC ports are accepted until the buffer availability falls below the limit defined by the percent-value argument. Below this limit, new PFC reservations are rejected with an "Exhausted Buffer Resources" error.

  • [no] hardware profile pfc mmu buffer-reservation percent-value—Reserves a percentage of shared pool buffers that can be used for PFC reservations. The remainder of the shared buffer pool is reserved for drop classes. The range is from 0 to 100, and the default is 100.

You can disable these features using the no form of these commands.

SPAN and ERSPAN

The following features were introduced for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches in Cisco NX-OS 7.0(3)I2(1). They are also supported for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches in Cisco NX-OS Releases 7.0(3)IX1(2) and 7.0(3)IX1(2a) as well as in later releases starting with 7.0(3)I3(1):

ERSPAN enhancements:

  • Adds the allow-pfc option to the source interface type rx command to allow the spanning of priority flow control (PFC) frames in the Rx direction.

  • Adds egress interface information to the output of the show monitor session command.

  • Adds the ability to span forward packet drops in the ingress pipeline.

  • Adds support for user-defined field (UDF)-based ERSPAN to help analyze and isolate packet drops in the network.

  • Adds the set-erspan-gre-proto and set-erspan-dscp actions to the ERSPAN ACL.

SPAN enhancements—Adds support for user-defined field (UDF)-based SPAN to help analyze and isolate packet drops in the network.

For configuration information, see the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series System Management Configuration Guide, Release 7.x. However, please note the following changes in implementation for UDF-based SPAN and ERSPAN for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches:

  • The UDF filter is not supported on VLANs.

  • You need to carve a separate TCAM region for UDFs: ifacl-udf for UDFs on Layer 2 ports or racl-udf for UDFs on Layer 3 ports.

  • The command to attach UDFs to these TCAM regions is hardware access-list tcam region {ifacl-udf | racl-udf} qualify udf udf-names.

  • Source forward-drop access control list (ACL) entries will be programmed in these TCAM regions in the following order: span, racl-udf, ifacl-udf. (For Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches, source forward-drop is programmed only in the span TCAM region.)

  • You can create an ACL-based SPAN or ERSPAN session without UDF qualifiers in the ifacl-udf or racl-udf region, but not all of the qualifiers supported in the ifacl and racl regions are supported in the ifacl-udf and racl-udf regions.

TCAM Regions

These are the default TCAM regions for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches:

TCAM Region

Size

Width

Mode

Total Size

IPv4 RACL lite

1024

1

Intra-lite

2048

IPv4 Layer 3 QoS intra-lite

256

1

Intra-lite

512

System

256

2

Double

1024

CoPP system

256

1

Intra-lite

512

SPAN

256

2

Double

1024

vPC convergence

256

1

Intra-lite

512

Redirect

256

1

Intra-lite

512

6144

These are the new TCAM regions supported for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches:

Region Name

Description

Excluded Qualifiers (Compared to Non-Lite Version)

ifacl-lite

IPv4 port ACL lite

RangeCheck

DSCP

HiGig™

racl-lite

IPv4 RACL lite

DSCP

Drop

TTL

vacl-lite

IPv4 VACL lite

RangeCheck

DSCP

ifacl-udf

UDFs for Layer 2 interfaces

RangeCheck

DSCP

TTL

racl-udf

UDFs for Layer 3 interfaces

RangeCheck

DSCP

l3qos-intra-lite

IPv4 Layer 3 QoS intra-lite

RangeCheck

DstIpLocal

MyStationHi

IpFrag

ICMPTypeCode

Drop

HiGig™

TTL

qos-intra-lite

IPv4 port QoS intra-lite

RangeCheck

DstIpLocal

L3Routable

MyStationHit

IpFrag

ICMPTypeCode

Drop

HiGig™

TTL

vlan-qos-intra-lite

IPv4 VLAN QoS intra-lite

RangeCheck

OuterVlanCfi

IpFrag

ICMPTypeCode

HiGig™

For more information on TCAM regions and how to configure TCAM region sizes, see the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Security Configuration Guide, Release 7.x.

Cisco SFP+ Adapter Module Support

Beginning with Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I4(2), you can use the CVR-2QSFP28-8SFP adapter for 25-Gigabit optics support on 100-Gigabit ports of the Cisco Nexus 3232C switch. The interface breakout module command can be used to split this switch's 100-Gigabit interfaces into four 25-Gigabit interfaces. After you enter this command, you must copy the running configuration to the startup configuration.

Unsupported Features

For the list of features that are supported for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches but not for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches in Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)I3(1), see the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Release Notes, Release 7.0(3)I3(1).

For the list of features that are supported for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches but not for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches in Cisco NX-OS Releases 7.0(3)IX1(2) and 7.0(3)IX1(2a), see the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q NX-OS Release Notes, Release 7.0(3)IX1(2).

User Documentation

Release Notes

Getting Started Information

Use the following documents to plan for and install your Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches:

Cisco NX-OS Configuration Information

Use the following documents to configure the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches using Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)IX1(2), 7.0(3)IX1(2a), 7.0(3)I3(1), or a later release:

Programming Information

Use the following documents to program the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches using Cisco NX-OS Release 7.0(3)IX1(2), 7.0(3)IX1(2a), 7.0(3)I3(1), or a later release:

Additional Information

Use the following documents to get additional information for the Cisco Nexus 3232C and 3264Q switches:

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