Catalyst 6500

The Catalyst 6500 is a modular chassis network switch manufactured by Cisco Systems since 1999, capable of delivering speeds of up to "400 million packets per second".

A 6500 comprises a chassis, power supplies, one or two supervisors, line cards and service modules. A chassis can have 3, 4, 6, 9 or 13 slots each (Catalyst model 6503, 6504, 6506, 6509, or 6513, respectively) with the option of one or two modular power supplies. The supervisor engine provides centralised forwarding information and processing; up to two of these cards can be installed in a chassis to provide active/standby or stateful failover. The line cards provide port connectivity and service modules to allow for devices such as firewalls to be integrated within the switch.

The 6500 Supervisor comprises a Multilayer Switch Feature Card (MSFC) and a Policy Feature Card (PFC). The MSFC runs all software processes, such as . The PFC makes forwarding decisions in hardware.

The supervisor has connections to the switching fabric and classic bus, as well as bootflash for the Cisco IOS software.

The latest generation supervisor is the Supervisor 2T. This supervisor was introduced at Cisco Live Las Vegas in July 2011. It provides 80 gigabits per slot on all slots of 6500-E chassis.

The 6500 currently supports three operating systems: CatOS, Native IOS and Modular IOS.

CatOS is supported for layer 2 (switching) operations only. To be able to perform routing functions (e.g. Layer 3) operations, the switch must be run in hybrid mode. In this case, CatOS runs on the Switch Processor (SP) portion of the Supervisor, and IOS runs on the Route Processor (RP) also known as the MSFC. To make configuration changes, the user must then manually switch between the two environments.

CatOS does have some functionality missing and is generally considered 'obsolete' compared to running a switch in Native Mode.

Cisco IOS can be run on both the SP and RP. In this instance, the user is unaware of where a command is being executed on the switch, even though technically two IOS images are loaded—one on each processor. This mode is the default shipping mode for Cisco products and enjoys support of all new features and line cards.

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