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sco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches are Cisco¡¯s latest addition to the fixed enterprise switching access platform and are built for security, resiliency, and programmability.
Compared to the scale and feature richness the of Catalyst 9300 Series switches, Catalyst 9200 Series switches focus on offering features for the mid-market and simple branch deployments.
Purpose of this guide is intended to help network planners and engineers who are familiar with the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series Switches deploy the Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches in the enterprise networking environment.
The Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series is based on Cisco¡¯s UADP 2.0 mini ASIC architecture and an internal ARM CPU architecture. This allows the switch to run with the Cisco IOS-XE operating system, which enables the switch to support standard YANG models through NETCONF or RESTCONF and to run scripts natively within the switch.
Table1 lists the system hardware differences between the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and 9200 Series.
Table1. Comparison of the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and 9200 Series system hardware
With a consistent hardware architecture and a shared code base with the rest of the Catalyst 9000 family, the Catalyst 9200 Series inherits enhanced functionalities that otherwise would not be supported on Catalyst 2960-X switches. These feature sets provide increased resiliency and security through features such as MACsec, Cisco SD-Access, and support for Cisco TrustSec.
Table2 lists the major system software differences between Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and 9200 Series switches.
Table2. System software differences
The system default behavior on Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series switches are very much the same as that of the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series. For example, interfaces default to the layer 2 switch-port mode and IP routing is disabled. However, there are also some differences:
Table3 lists the management port differences between the two platforms.
Table3. Comparison of management interface default configurations on Catalyst 2960-X and 9200 switches
Table4 compares the power capabilities of the Catalyst 9200 Series with those of the Catalyst 2960-X Series.
Table4. Power capabilities comparison between Catalyst 2960-X and Catalyst 9200 series
Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Switches have Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 10-GE ports only. The uplink ports on the Catalyst 2960-X Series had <Type><Slot#>/<Bay#>/<Port#>, whereas the 9200 Series has <Type><Switch#>/<Bay#>/<Port#>
Table5 compares the interface numbering between the two platforms.
Table5. Interface numbering
The StackWise160/80 architecture on the Catalyst 9200 Series provides a more robust and highly available infrastructure when compared to FlexStack Plus or Extended on the Catalyst 2960-X Series. In StackWise160/80, eight switches can be stacked together to form a single logical switch with support for SSO mechanisms. This enables 1:1 redundancy during failovers. This 1:1 redundancy allows for a role of a standby switch, which would take over the role of the active switch, an improvement over the FlexStack architecture, where the failure of master switch would cause a re-election between the stack members. Table 6 compares the stacking architecture between the Catalyst 2960-X and Catalyst 9200 Series Switches.
Table6. Stacking comparison between Catalyst 2960-X and 9200 switches
For details on the features supported on the Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series, use the Feature Navigator on cisco.com. For customers migrating from the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series to the 9200 Series, following are the only feature differences:
On the Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series, the global command ¡°system mtu ¡± sets the global MTU for all interfaces, whereas on 2960-X Series the command to set MTU was ¡°system mtu jumbo ¡±. With the Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series, the IP MTU is a per-interface-level command that sets a protocol-specific MTU for the interface. Table 7 explains how to set the system MTU.
Table7. Setting the system MTU
The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series supports IP Device Tracking (IPDT) for keeping track of connected hosts (association of MAC and IP addresses). The Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series, with the latest Cisco IOS XE Software release, supports the new Switch Integrated Security Features (SISF) based on the IPDT feature. It acts as a container policy that enables snooping and device-tracking features available with First-Hop Security (FHS), in both IPv4 and IPv6, using IP-agnostic Command-Line Interface (CLI) commands. See Appendix A for more information on migrating from the IPDT CLI configuration to the new SISFbased device-tracking CLI configuration.
Both the Catalyst 9200 Series and the Catalyst 2960-X Series support Flexible NetFlow. Besides the scalability differences, there are a few differences in the capabilities and configurations, as listed in Table8.
Table8. Flexible NetFlow differences
The Catalyst 9200 Series supports the monolithic bundle boot mode as well as the optimized install boot mode, whereas the Catalyst 2960-X Series supports only the traditional bundle mode. All Catalyst 9200 switches ship with the default install boot mode.
Table9 compares the boot mechanism between the two platforms. Table 10 shows how to ignore the startup configuration.
Table9. Boot modes on Catalyst 2960-X and Catalyst 9200 Series Switches
Table10. Ignoring the startup configuration
The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series uses the traditional ¡°write erase¡± command in Cisco IOS Software and deleting of the configuration file and vlan.dat file in ROMMON to reset the switch. The Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series provides an exec ¡°factory-reset¡± command that removes all customer-specific data that has been added to the device since the time of its shipping. Erased data includes configurations, log files, boot variables, core files, and credentials. The device reloads to perform the factory-reset task and stays in ROMMON mode.
The ASICs and operating system that power the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X and Catalyst 9200 Series are different, resulting in some differences in QoS behaviors, as described in Table11.
Table11. QoS differences between the 9200 and 2960-X Switches
Table12 lists other QoS specifications in the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and Catalyst 9200 Series.
Table12. QoS specifications in the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and Catalyst 9200 Series
The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series supports only Weighted Tail Drop (WTD), which discards packets based on configured thresholds. The Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series uses both WTD and Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED), which randomly discards packets at specified queue thresholds based on IP precedence, Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP), or Class of Service (CoS), giving the network architect much more control over the drop behavior. Following is an example of a WRED configuration on the 9200 Series.
policy-map 2P6Q3T
class PRIORITY-QUEUE
priority level 1
class VIDEO-PRIORITY-QUEUE
priority level 2 class DATA-QUEUE
bandwidth remaining percent queue-buffers ratio random-detect dscp-based random-detect dscp 10 percent 60 80
Table13 lists commands that are specific to the Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series and are not available on the Catalyst 9200 Series.
Table13. Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series platform-specific commands
The Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series is Cisco¡¯s latest addition to our fixed enterprise switching access platform. It is the new generation of the access platform, with many additional capabilities, and is well-suited for enterprises looking to migrate from their existing Cisco Catalyst 2960-X Series deployment.
If your device has no legacy IP device-tracking or IPv6 snooping configurations, you can use only the new SISF-based device-tracking commands for all your future configurations. The legacy IPDT commands and IPv6 snooping commands are not available.
Table14 displays the new SISF-based device-tracking commands and the corresponding IPDT and IPv6 snooping commands.
Table14. IPDT, IPv6 snooping, and device-tracking CLI compatibility