Cisco N7K-C7010-XL Full Description

Critical Clarification

1. Short Overview

2. Core Definition: N7K-C7010-XL License vs Base N7K-C7010 Chassis

1) Physical Hardware (unchanged, same as N7K-C7010 bare chassis)

• Chassis form factor: 21RU 10-slot front panel modular switch
• Front slots: 8 universal I/O line card slots + 2 redundant Supervisor-2/2E slots
• Rear: 5 hot-swappable Fabric-2 crossbar modules, up to 3×6000W AC/DC power supplies, dual separate fan trays (system fan + dedicated fabric fan)
• Airflow: Fixed front-to-back cold intake (cold aisle standard, no hot-aisle E variant)
• Full OIR hot-swap for all FRUs (fabric, supervisors, line cards, power, fans)
• Max port density: 8×48-port 40G F2E line cards = 384×40G Ethernet/FCoE ports; compatible with 10G SFP+ FCoE storage traffic
• Base fabric bandwidth: 4.1 Tbps full-duplex non-blocking with five active-active crossbar modules
• Identical physical dimensions, racking, power capacity, cooling, module compatibility as standard N7K-C7010

2) What N7K-C7010-XL License Unlocks (XL Scalable Feature Differences vs default base license)

1. Expanded MAC address table: 128,000 entries (base license limited to smaller scale for small deployments)
2. Extended IPv4 unicast route scale: 128,000 routes; IPv6 unicast: 64,000 routes (base license caps route table for small enterprise)
3. XL buffer mode support for all M1/M2 series line cards (N7K-M132XP, N7K-M224XP): Larger per-port VOQ virtual output queues, higher buffer credits for lossless FCoE and high-scale multi-tenant congestion toleranceCisco
4. Full VDC virtual device context capacity (4 independent logical switch partitions, base license restricted VDC scale)
5. Unlimited multi-protocol feature scale: Full OTV cross-data-center overlay, LISP workload mobility, MPLS VPLS/VPLS/EVPN-FC, IVR Inter-VSAN Routing, FCIP extension without route/tenant count limits
6. Unrestricted SAN feature scale: Full FCoE, FICON, DMM non-disruptive data migration, IOA I/O acceleration, streaming SAN telemetry export
7. Full carrier-grade multi-tenant isolation for large service provider PoP deployments (higher VRF, multicast, ACL scale)
8. Eliminates base license throughput/feature count throttling for hyperscale virtualized data center workloads

3. Suffix Breakdown

• N7K-C7010: Base 10-slot Nexus 7010 chassis identifier
• XL: Scalable eXtra Large forwarding table / buffer / route scale feature license (Cisco ONE perpetual feature pack)
• Full formal SKU: C1-N7K-C7010-XL (Cisco ONE bundled license for Nexus 7010 XL scale features)

3. Chassis Fixed Hardware Architecture (Same as N7K-C7010)

Front Slot Layout (21RU rack)

Rear Redundant Subsystems

1. 5× N7K-C7010-FAB2 crossbar fabric modules (active-active load-sharing, 4.1 Tbps total bandwidth)
2. Up to three 6000W Platinum AC/DC hot-swappable power supplies (2+1 N+1 redundancy)
3. Two independent hot-swappable fan trays: N7K-C7010-FAN-S (system I/O/supervisor cooling) + N7K-C7010-FAN-F (fabric dedicated cooling)

Management Interfaces (per Supervisor)

• RS232 serial console, mini USB local console
• Dual 1G out-of-band management Ethernet ports (separate telemetry export port)
• External USB flash for NX-OS image/config backup

Airflow

4. Performance Specifications (Hardware fixed; XL license unlocks full scale)

1. Full non-blocking fabric throughput: 4.1 Tbps full-duplex
2. Wire-speed forwarding rate: 4100 Mpps at 40G line rate
3. MAC table (XL enabled): 128,000 entries (base license reduced)
4. IPv4 unicast routes (XL): 128,000; IPv6: 64,000; multicast: 32,000
5. VDC maximum: 4 independent logical virtual switches (XL full capacity)
6. Port-channels: 1024 logical trunks, max 16 ports per bundle
7. Converged FCoE hardware offload: PFC lossless priority flow control, DCBX, VNTag, FC-NVMe tunneling
8. Multi-protocol offload: OTV encapsulation, LISP endpoint mapping, FCIP compression/tape acceleration, DMM migration, IOA storage offload

5. Full NX-OS Feature Set Activated by N7K-C7010-XL License

Layer 2 & Converged FCoE SAN-LAN

• VDC virtual multi-tenant isolation (4 full VDCs, unlimited tenant scale)
• 4094 VLANs per VDC, PVLAN private VLAN isolation
• Full lossless FCoE stack: VSAN storage fabrics, hard WWN zoning, Auto-Zone, FC-NVMe low-latency forwarding
• MSTP spanning tree, vPC dual-active peer-link redundancy, SPAN/RSPAN traffic analytics
• NPV/NPIV FCoE edge mode to offload MDS SAN fabric registration

Multilayer Routing & Data Center Interconnect (XL unlimited scale)

• OSPF/EIGRP/BGP IPv4/IPv6 dynamic routing, VRF multi-tenant routing separation
• IVR Inter-VSAN Routing (licensed feature fully unlocked by XL pack)
• OTV Overlay Transport Virtualization: Cross-DC layer 2 workload mobility for disaster recovery
• LISP Locator/ID Separation Protocol: Multi-pod workload mobility
• Complete carrier MPLS suite: LDP, VPLS, VPWS, EVPN-FC dual-stack IPv4/IPv6
• FCIP tunnel hardware acceleration for long-distance tape backup replication

QoS, Security & Automation

• Four hardware priority queues per port for storage, VM east-west, management, backup traffic
• RBAC granular multi-tier admin access, ISE identity integration
• SSHv2, SNMPv3, AES encrypted startup config, DH-CHAP FCoE authentication
• FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance for regulated finance/government environments
• Cisco DCNM centralized converged LAN/SAN graphical management, REST API automation
• POAP zero-touch provisioning, onboard Python scripting, streaming hardware telemetry export
• GOLD continuous hardware diagnostics without traffic interruption

6. High Availability Hardware Architecture (Identical to N7K-C7010)

1. Up to three redundant 6000W power supplies (N+1 triple power redundancy)
2. Dual independent hot-swappable fan trays (survive single fan tray loss without outage)
3. Five active-active crossbar fabric modules; single fabric module removal does not degrade total throughput
4. Dual redundant Supervisor-2/2E with stateful failover, non-disruptive ISSU firmware upgrades
5. Full OIR hot-swap maintenance for all FRUs (no full chassis power cycle required)
6. Front-to-back airflow optimized for mainstream cold-aisle data center rack deployments

7. Typical Deployment Scenarios for N7K-C7010-XL Licensed Chassis

1. Large virtualized multi-pod data center core aggregation: XL license unlocks full route/MAC table scale for thousands of virtual machine east-west flows and large FCoE storage fabrics
2. Medium-to-large service provider multi-tenant PoP edge gateway: Unlimited VRF, MPLS, EVPN scale for hundreds of enterprise customer logical LAN/SAN partitions
3. Financial/mainframe enterprise converged SAN-LAN core: Full FICON, FCIP, DMM migration feature capacity for zSystems tape backup cross-site disaster recovery
4. Large campus multi-building data center interconnection: OTV/LISP full scale for multi-pod workload mobility across primary and DR sites
5. Hyperscale all-flash NVMe storage fabric core: XL buffer mode on M-series line cards eliminates congestion loss for low-latency FC-NVMe storage traffic

8. Package Composition Clarification

• N7K-C7010-XL (C1-N7K-C7010-XL) isonly the software feature license, it does not include physical chassis, supervisors, power supplies, fan trays, fabric modules or line cards
• Physical hardware components must be ordered separately: N7K-C7010 bare chassis, dual Sup2/Sup2E, 5×Fab2 crossbars, 3×6000W PSUs, two fan trays, I/O line cards, transceivers, additional feature add-ons (OTV, FCIP, FICON)
• Bundled hardware SKUs like N7K-C7010-B2S2 combine physical chassis + dual supervisors; you must purchase N7K-C7010-XL license separately to enable XL scalable forwarding scale

Short Commercial Summary