Supervisor Engine (Cisco)


The Cisco Supervisor Engine serves as the management card for modular Cisco switches that can also, in some cases, act as forwarding/routing element.
Over time, the Supervisor Engine has undergone multiple iterations and was different for different modular switches in Cisco Portfolio.
Supervisor Engine typically offers management of entire chassis in modular system, control over its power, cooling and physical management interfaces, as well as Line Cards that host its own physical interfaces to serve user traffic.
Some models of Supervisor Engines can also process traffic, albeit at reduced scale and speed. Typically, traffic processing is distributed to line cards, which host their own NPUs or ASICs that are programmed by Supervisor to properly forward, filter and otherwise process user traffic. Supervisor Engines can also host switching matrix, that connects line cards together and allows for faster traffic transport between ports on different line cards, as well as can support traffic replication for multicast.
Cisco uses CEF to create forwarding and routing tables, that in modular switches and routers is distributed using dCEF. Line Cards that offer distributed forwarding & routing run their own copy of CEF tables thanks to dCEF.
Abridged list of features:

Specifications

Supervisor EngineMppsSwitching LayerBandwidthCPU FrequencyMax RamMax FlashOSMinimum IOS
11521.23225 MHz Motorola 68k128MB16MBCatOSN/A
230218150 MHz Mips R4700128MB16MBCatOSN/A
2+48464266 MHz R4700256MB32MBCatOS/IOS
3154?150300 MHz256MB?IOS12.1
448464333 MHz512MB128MBIOS12.1
51364102400800 MHz512MB?IOS12.2
625043201.3 GHz1GB?IOS12.2
7204004505720600 MHz2GB64MBCatOS/IOS
32532300 MHzIOS
2T720520804GB2GBIOS

Details

Supervisor Engine I
Supervisor Engine II
  • MIPS R4700
  • Chassis: 2926, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600
Supervisor Engine II+
Supervisor Engine III
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Max DRAM: 256MB SD
  • Redundant Capable
  • Netflow accelerator card
Supervisor Engine IV
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Max Flash: 64MB
Supervisor Engine V
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Chassis: 4500
Supervisor Engine 6
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Chassis: 4500 "E" Series
Supervisor Engine 32
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Chassis: 6000, 6500, 7600
  • A low cost, reduced version of the 720
  • Policy Feature Card 3b
  • MSFC 2A?
Supervisor Engine 720
  • Cisco Express Forwarding
  • Policy Feature Card 3A, 3B, 3BXL
  • Chassis: 6500, 7600
MSFC1-3