In the last few weeks, I had the possibility to play around with new Extreme Networks SLX 9540 branded switches, that were originally developed and sold by Brocade Communications. This is the first article of a small series focusing on SLX gotchas, starting with the basic concepts and the hypervisor vision, mainly focused on the software stack.

SLX in field action

The SLX 9540 is a 48x10GbE and 6x100GbE deep buffer switch that can be used in WAN edge, IXP and colocation deployments. With OptiScale Routing and advance licensing it supports full BGP routing tables, MPLS and VXLAN.

The SLX feels kind of unique and contrasting to the well-established platform routers like the Brocade MLX family, that has a stable network operating system but a limited userland. And with its download volume of eight gigabytes, the SLX operating system promises to be a fully loaded box of toys.

The new hardware architecture and data plane is built around commodity Broadcom network processors in a sufficient or industry leading (marketing!) factor and density, however the control planes for management- and line cards all run on Intel XEON x86 processors. That is a big contrast to former Brocade products that make a lot of use of the Power PC architecture.

Also instead of a custom operation system like VDX NOS or Ironware the SLX runs a normal Ubuntu Linux installation as a host operating system solely for the usage of running KVM based virtualization on it. In point of fact even what we call the management interface itself — the SLX-VM — is running as a Linux based virtual machine all along.

Additionally every SLX-OS comes with a decoupled Ubuntu Linux third party virtual machine (in jargon: TPVM) that is going to be connected to internal hardware based streaming and analytics paths to run tcpdump or similar diagnostics tools directly on the device. Also if you want to run docker containers, nmap, Arpsponge or any custom service to program your device — here is the place to be.