11th February 2012

Nexus 7000 and Discounted OTV License Pak for NXOS

There are, currently, four different license upgrades for the Nexus 7000 and Cisco has a discounted license for the OTV feature set. The normal license cost for OTV is list USD$25000. But for some period of time, probably to encourage early adopters, the license has a special part number that sell for USD$5000.

N7K-TRS1K9 Nexus 7000 Transport Services License (OTV) $25,000
N7K-TRS-P1 Limited Time Promotion for Transport Services license (OTV) $5,000

Technical Note

Of course, Cisco requires that you have a full set of licenses to use OTV, even if you don’t want them. Thus to use the OTV license you must also have the L3 licenses and the VDC license.

N7K-LAN1K9: $15,000
N7K-ADV1K9: $20,000

So even if you ONLY want the OTV feature for L2 extension, you are still going to pay USD$40000 per chassis.

Apologies if I implied that Nexus OTV was cheap. Because it isn’t. Thanks to Chris Marget for pointing that out in the comments.

The EtherealMind View

Yay, a discount from Cisco! That doesn’t happen every day.

After the usual customer discounts, that’s a tasty reduction. I will probably just buy these licenses to have them, but we are not planning on using them for a couple of years. Of course, Cisco will soon state that (very large) number of OTV licenses have been sold and therefore it has been well received by customers and you should be using OTV as well. You won’t be able to find anyone who is actually using it in real life. Such are the lies of marketing.

Also, watch out for less scrupulous resellers who might try to sell you the full license and earn themselves a nice little bonus by shipping the discounted item.

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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • chris marget

    I think you’ll find that the $5000 OTV license requires you to purchase $35,000 in other licenses:
    N7K-LAN1K9: $15,000 (you probably want this one anyway)
    N7K-ADV1K9: $20,000 (this one maybe not)

    I don’t get the link between N7K-ADV1K9 (VDC, CTS ONLY) and OTV, but the configurator says it’s required.

  • scott o

    wonder how much the licenses will be for the other OTV platforms ?
    6500 ??

  • SB

    According to:
    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps9494/ps9372/product_bulletin_c25-577133.html
    …only the Enterprise Licence (N7K-LAN1K9) and Transport Services Licence (N7K-TRS1K9) are required.