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OL-11615-01
CoPP on Supervisors 720 and 32 (Catalyst 6500)
CoPP is supported on Catalyst 6500 Series switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers with Supervisors 720
and 32 running Cisco IOS software. This section describes the implementation details of CoPP on
Supervisors 720 and 32.
In the Catalyst 6500 Series switches, CoPP takes advantage of the processing power present on
line-cards by implementing a distributed CoPP model. In this platform, the class QoS policies are
centrally configured under the control-plane configuration mode. When configured, these policies are
first applied at the route processor (MSFC) level, and then they get automatically pushed to the Policy
Feature Card (PFC) and each Distributed Forwarding Card (DFC). This CoPP model is illustrated in
Figure 4.
Figure 4 Supervisor 32/720 CoPP
CoPP at the RP is performed in software while on the PFC and DFCs it is processed in hardware, with
no performance degradation or increased latency. In this way, CoPP on Supervisors 32 and 720 provides
two layers of protection: first, at wire speed on the PFC and DFCs, and second, at the RP level. This
helps to ensure that only the amount of traffic specified by the user actually reaches the control plane.
Note The PFC3 and DFC3 provide hardware support for CoPP.
The Cisco Catalyst 6500 supports CoPP on the Supervisor 720 and Supervisor 32 in hardware starting
with Cisco IOS release 12.2(18)SXD1. CoPP supports IPv4 in hardware, while multicast and broadcast
traffic are only supported in software. Support for IPv6 traffic has been introduced in IOS release
12.2(18)SXE.