Do I get to study for the switching exam at work? Well, kind of. I was stuck doing a lot of Etherchannel configurations today. It reminded me of the ongoing issues at work from a few years back where slow Etherchannel connections on 6500 Catalyst switches were causing issues and how it all made sense once I read up on the module design issues for that switch. More is here - mainly under the 'Restriction' section about half way down the document. It states:

"The WS-X6548-GE-TX, WS-X6548V-GE-TX, WS-X6148-GE-TX, and WS-X6148V-GE-TX modules have a limitation with EtherChannel."

This all seems to go back to the design on the module and how the onboard ASICs were capable of gigabit but 'managed' banks of 8 ports. Kind of the classic oversubscription model of the dotcom ISP days. I guess you have to get the 6748 (or better) modules to get over that hump.

It also made me wonder if the ongoing move to virtualize is going to hit Intel in a not-so-nice way. Will there be a generalized oversubscription module applied to servers hosting virtual machines? I would think virtualization itself would cause some hit to the demand for the 'biggest and bestest' CPU(s) on the market but if it is accompanied by some oversubscription model (especially in the 'cloud computing' arena), what hit does that end up making on market demand?

Separate from that, it seems to me that "virtual server hosting services" have the potential of being the new "web hosting services" which companies in the dotcom days were cashing in on. We went from 1998-2001 when a plethora of pre-teen and teenage girls* were putting up websites with glaring pictures, MIDI files, animated GIFs and weird-assed fonts which caused excessive eye strain to the potential of pre-teen and teenage girls (or boys) to not only host sites but manage servers. This is a bit scary to me.

* This is not intended to be sexist. It just always seemed to me that a HUGE majority of such sites - whether on tripod or geocities or whoever - were put up by girls - mostly 13-16 years old. Yes, some of the sites weren't bad. Sadly, I suspect the potential for those girls to have entered into the IT field crapped out partly because IT can be somewhat female-unfriendly and the dotcom bust made entering the IT field much less appealing.