This chapter contains an overview of splitting single 40G port to 4x10G ports.

Port Breakout system enables numerous 40GbE/100GbE ports to be broken out into 4x10GbE, 4x25GbE, 2x50GbE ports through a secure, highly reliable breakout cabling solution. Today’s large-scale virtualized datacenter networks require a mix of 10Gb, 25Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet interface speeds able to utilize the widest range of flexible connectivity options. These same networks require a variety of cost-effective cabling options for both addressing connectivity and allowing for simple migrations as network speeds and density requirements evolve. As data centers scale and bandwidth demands increase, the networking infrastructure must be capable of scaling with it. Port Breakout feature provides flexibility in splitting 40G to 4x10G and 100G to 4x10G, 4x25G, 2x50G cabling and vice-versa whenever requires, and hence provide Administrator a great flexibility in choosing the port speed as per their requirement. A Port Breakout group consists of 4 ports, first port will be control port and the rest 3 are subsidiary ports. Naming of Control port and its subsidiary port is as below

xe50/1, xe50/2, xe50/3, xe50/4

In xe50, numeral 50 indicates the slot of the port on a board and numerals after “/” indicates port numbers on that slot. First port (interface 50/1 in above example) is always control port whereas the rest 3 ports (ports 50/2, 50/3 and 50/4) are subsidiary ports. Only Control port can become 40G or 100G port. For Transceiver types mentioned in fec command will be enabled by default for both control port and the rest 3 subsidiary ports. If Peer is not supporting FEC, fec off needs to be configured on the ports manually.

Currently below breakout options are available

Following is a brief description of terms and concepts used to describe port breakout.

A 40G or 100G split-able port is called Control port.

A control port which is split into 4x10G 4x25G or 2x50 ports.

Ports which are members of Control Port, A subsidiary port can be Active or InActive

Subsidiary ports whose control port is not configured for “Port Breakout”

From OcNOS version 5.1 onwards, before doing the Port breakout we need to reserve the VLANs using the CLI vlan-reservation vlan-id/vlan-range.

The advantage of using vlan-reservation is when port breakout is not required,

Configuring Port Breakout (40G to 4x10G) is provided in below section.

 

Configuring Port Breakout (40G to 4x10G) is provided in below section.

Below output before applying port-breakout config on xe50/1:

Configuring Port Breakout (40G to 4x10G) is provided in below section.

Removing Port Breakout is provided in below section.

Here xe50/1 is a control Port whereas xe50/2, xe50/3 and xe50/4 are their subsidiary ports. The out-put shows only xe50/1 is active (interface up and running) whereas other ports are inactive (interface up but not running).

Below Outputs after applying port-breakout configured on xe50/1:

Configuring Port Breakout (100G to 4x10G) is provided in below section.

 

Configuring Port Breakout (100G to 4x25G) is provided in below section.

 

Configuring Port Breakout (100G to 2x50G) is provided in below section.

 

This port breakout command at global configuration level is applicable only for Trident III and Tomahawk II platforms. The interface level breakout and global hardware-profile CLI does not work for Trident III and Tomahawk II platforms.

Configuring Port Breakout (4X10g | 4X25g | 2X50g) at global configuration level is provided in below section.