Major SIX Maintenance Friday October 26th 0700-1500 UTC (0000-0800 PDT) A hardware upgrade of the core Arista 7508 switch will be performed on Friday October 26th, starting at 0700 UTC (midnight PDT). The maintenance window is 8 hours long. Purpose: - 2x supervisors will be upgraded - 6x fabric modules will be upgraded, resulting in a backplane change from a 7508E (Arad) to a 7508R (Jericho) - 2x 12-port 100G line cards will be replaced with 2x 36-port 100G line cards This will be a major fabric disruption. About 155 of the SIX's current 325 routers will be offline. It is recommended that you mitigate this disruption by re-routing your traffic flows in advance of the maintenance window. That said, PLEASE DO NOT disable your interfaces. Doing so will waste valuable time and frustrate the process of verifying that all is operational after the upgrade. Disable BGP if you like, but NOT link. We will block BGP port 179 packets, on the switch being upgraded, at the start of maintenance per: https://ripe67.ripe.net/presentations/374-WH-IXPMaintReduce.pdf This is being done in an attempt to prevent the blackholing of production traffic while BGP hold timers expire. With this method, BGP will timeout sessions while the fabric continues to deliver your non-BGP traffic. After hold timers expire, your routers should route packets to your other paths, resulting in minimal disruption of production packets. The BGP blocking will happen only on the switch being upgraded - the Arista 7508. Participants on other switches will have connectivity to other networks on the same switch as them, but not to switches in which the 7508 is in between. Refer to: https://www.seattleix.net/images/topology.png to see how the various core switches and extensions are connected. The list of networks on the 7508 and extensions connected to it is up at: https://www.seattleix.net/participants/switches/SIX_7508E.txt https://www.seattleix.net/participants/switches/Equinix.txt https://www.seattleix.net/participants/switches/IX_Reach.txt https://www.seattleix.net/participants/switches/Wave.txt https://www.seattleix.net/participants/switches/Wowrack.txt The start and end of maintenance will be announced. If you have multiple routers in Seattle and want to get a second router connected to the core 7512R switch which will remain operational, we are happy to work with you to get this established in advance of the maintenance. Questions to info@seattleix.net. Thanks, The SIX Crew