Supervisor Engine (Cisco). The Cisco Supervisor Engine serves as the management card for modular Cisco switches that can also, in some cases, act as forwarding/routing element.

Over time, the Supervisor Engine has undergone multiple iterations and was different for different modular switches in Cisco Portfolio (Catalyst 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 9400, 9600 and Nexus switches).

Supervisor Engine typically offers management of entire chassis in modular system, control over its power (PSU, Power Supply Units), cooling (fans) and physical management interfaces, as well as Line Cards (LCs) that host its own physical interfaces to serve user traffic.

Some models of Supervisor Engines can also process traffic, albeit at reduced scale and speed. Typically, traffic processing is distributed to line cards (LCs), which host their own NPUs (Network Processing Units) or ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that are programmed by Supervisor to properly forward, filter and otherwise process user traffic. Supervisor Engines can also host switching matrix, that connects line cards together and allows for faster traffic transport between ports on different line cards, as well as can support traffic replication for multicast.

Cisco uses CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) to create forwarding and routing tables, that in modular switches and routers is distributed using dCEF (distributed CEF). Line Cards that offer distributed forwarding & routing run their own copy of CEF tables thanks to dCEF.

Abridged list of features:

 802.1q VLAN
 Spanning Tree Protocol
 Ether Channel
 Jumbo Frames
 (E)IGRP, OSPF, RIP (2), Static Routing
 BGP, IS-IS
 QOS
 Layer 3 and 4 Switching

Specifications

Details 

Supervisor Engine I
 68EC040
 Chassis: 2900, 2948G, 2980G, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine II
 MIPS R4700
 Chassis: 2926, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine II+
 MIPS R4700
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Chassis: 2926, 4000, 4500, 5000, 5500, 6000, 6500, 7600

Supervisor Engine III
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Max DRAM: 256MB SD
 Redundant Capable
 Netflow accelerator card

Supervisor Engine IV
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Max Flash: 64MB (supplemental Compact Flash optional)

 
Supervisor Engine V
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Chassis: 4500

Supervisor Engine 6
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Chassis: 4500 "E" Series

Supervisor Engine 32
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Chassis: 6000, 6500, 7600
 A low cost, reduced version of the 720
 Policy Feature Card 3b
 MSFC 2A?

Supervisor Engine 720
 Cisco Express Forwarding
 Policy Feature Card 3A, 3B, 3BXL
 Chassis: 6500, 7600

MSFC1-3
 Multi-Layer Switch Feature Card

See also 

 Cisco IOS
 Catalyst switch
 Catalyst 6500
 Cisco Catalyst 4500 Series Switches

References 

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps663/products_tech_note09186a00801a5d58.shtml
http://www.ciscosystems.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps4324/product_data_sheet09186a00801fcaba.pdf
http://www.cisco.ac/application/pdf/en/us/guest/products/ps4324/c1167/ccmigration_09186a008011b8da.pdf
http://www.berkcom.com/resources/cisco/C6500_ccmigration_09186a00800887fd.pdf
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps663/products_tech_note09186a0080094645.shtml
 
 
 
 
 

Cisco products
Cisco Systems