Cisco 4900M and HP SFP+ Cable Incompatibility

[chuckk281]

Robert had a cable question:

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Hello All,

        I have a customer who is being told by Cisco that the HP Branded SFP+ cable (487655-B21)

is not supported with the Cisco 4900M switch and the VC Flex10. When they attach the HP Branded

cable they can see no uplinks. However, when they use Cisco's SFP+ cables they can see uplinks but the Virtual Connect

logs flags them as unsupported. They have tried multiple HP Branded cables with no success.

This customer is caught between two vendors that both claim that the others vendors cable is unsupported.

Has anyone encountered this issue? Is the Cisco IOS responsible for this incompatibility?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

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Vincent replied:

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I guess you mean that VC 3.01 brought support for Cisco DAC cables, specifically the ones listed in the Quickspecs:

Cisco 3-m 10G SFP+ Copper Twinax Cable SFP-H10GB-CU3M

Cisco 5-m 10G SFP+ Copper Twinax Cable SFP-H10GB-CU5M

The HP 3m DAC cable has been supported in VC Flex-10 since day 1.

As to Cisco supporting HP cables in their switches, that’s squarely a question for Cisco. Some of their products do and some don’t.

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ANother point to remember is that this release of Virtual Connect allows "unsupported" cables to be connected and will just note that in the status of the link. It will allow the switch to connect where previous version of VC did not allow "unsupported" cables to even attempt to connect.