Filter
Top Products
Chapter 7: Powering On the Chassis
184
Monitoring the Initialization Process
The control and line cards perform an initialization process when you
power on or reset the chassis. The process may have up to three phases.
The number of phases and their durations depend on the number of
control cards in the chassis. There are three possible configurations:
Configuration 1: Chassis with one control card.
The initialization process for a chassis that has only one control
card has two phases. The entire process takes approximately two
minutes. In the first phase the control card initializes its
management software. In the second phase the line cards initialize
their management software and receive their configuration settings
from the control card. The control and line cards begin forwarding
network traffic at the completion of the initialization process.
Configuration 2: Chassis with two control cards that have identical
configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two control cards has
three phases. The first two phases are the same as in configuration
1. At their completion, the Ethernet line cards begin to forward
traffic from their ports and the active control card starts to forward
traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available bandwidth
across the backplane is 200Mbps.
In the third phase the inactive control card synchronizes its
database and load files with the active card. If the databases and
files are already the same, the third phase requires about thirty
seconds, after which the inactive control card joins with the active
card in forwarding packets across the backplane, to provide the full
400Mbps of backplane bandwidth.
Configuration 3: Chassis with two control cards that have different
configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two control cards has
three phases. At the completion of the first two phases, which are
the same as in configuration 1, the Ethernet line cards begin to
forward traffic from their ports and the active control card starts to
forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available
bandwidth across the backplane is 200Mbps.
During the third phase, the inactive control card synchronizes its
configuration database and load files with the active control card.
The length of the third phase depends on the differences in the
files, and may take several minutes to complete. During the
synchronization, the inactive control card does not forward traffic
across the backplane. Only after it has fully synchronized its files