^^^^^^
Blasting in from the future.> I'm in the process of determining weather or not to purchase several
> VIP cards and modules for a few 7513's I have at remote locationsSince you say "several", there's one amusing (or not, as the case may
be) gotcha, which is that interface cards are reset and initialized
sequentially. For normal cards this is no big deal, but for VIPs the
process is considerably more involved and time-consuming -- the VIP is
a stand-alone system with it's own special IOS image, and it takes 2-3
minutes to boot. Hence, expect a 7513 fully loaded with VIPs to spend
half an hour booting before it starts doing anything useful. Cisco is
apparently working on parallel booting, but AFAIK it isn't there yet.
Hogwash! While I'm not a complete fan of the Cisco boot process (in
particular, the apparent redundancy of much of the bootstrap process),
it takes nothing like 30 minutes to load a fully loaded box. A number
of our 7513's are populated with only VIP2-40s (in all 11 slots), and
take on the order or ~5 minutes to load. The most time-intensive
operation is decompressing the images (which themselves are getting a
bit silly in size, especially the -boot images).
Downloading microcode to VIP2 processors takes relatively little time.