6450 doesn't have MVRP ?

[jdsm]

Hi everyone,

Recently we purchased a set of OS6450 switches. We were told by Alcatel-Lucent that these switches were launched to replace the OS6400.
Right now I bit disapointed with theses switches. They have worse specs than OS6400 a few important details:
- The CPU (2 ARMv5 cores inside a Marvell SOC) has a lower clock rate (320MHz) and a smaller CPU Cache (8k). The OS6400 has 2 PPC603e cores at 400MHz, each one with 32k Cache.
- OS6450 doesn't have MVRP. Only has GVRP. OS6400 already had MVRP in 6.4.3.

It seems to me a downgrade. Probably OS6450 was developed with energy efficiency in mind, but I should ask why Alcatel decided to include GVRP and not MVRP ?

We have factory shipped firmware: 6.6.3.

Anyone has any thoughts about this?

Regards,
Jorge Matias

[devnull]

I would not consider a different CPU type as a downgrade, as most of the things are done in Hardware, and the cpu is only used for some other (management) tasks. Further i don't now whether the ARM5 are custom silicon (e.g. with specialized functions built as hardware blocks), so i would not stress that..

For MVRP: you are probably right. But this is probably because of the AOS Software (6.6.3 instead of 6.6.4), not hardware based.

But afaik you gain at other points as the 6450 supports e.g. VRRP which the 6400 does not.

MVRP may be supported in a later release (as manual states "MVRP is not supported in this release")

So open a Service/Product Request and hope for the best.

Hint: OS7 Switches (6900/OS10k) not even support amap, but i don't think they are downgrades..

[jdsm]

I would not consider a different CPU type as a downgrade, as most of the things are done in Hardware, and the cpu is only used for some other (management) tasks. Further i don't now whether the ARM5 are custom silicon (e.g. with specialized functions built as hardware blocks), so i would not stress that..

For MVRP: you are probably right. But this is probably because of the AOS Software (6.6.3 instead of 6.6.4), not hardware based.

But afaik you gain at other points as the 6450 supports e.g. VRRP which the 6400 does not.

MVRP may be supported in a later release (as manual states "MVRP is not supported in this release")

So open a Service/Product Request and hope for the best.

Thanks for the tip.
We have a building with 6400's and they have MVRP active. That makes it a lot easier to propagate VLANs to access ports. It would be annoying to replace with one 6400 with a 6450 and have to manage VLANs manually like we do in most of our ~150 switches.

Hint: OS7 Switches (6900/OS10k) not even support amap, but i don't think they are downgrades..

Neither do I.
I rather prefer LLDP instead of AMAP and have it disabled in almost all generations of Alcatel switches, starting from Alcatel 6024/6124.

Thanks for your reply.

Best Regards,
Jorge Matias