Question about transceiver compatibility.

[Gustavo_Ferreir]

Hello.

We have a series of 15000 and 23000 appliances and will be refreshing to equipment from the Quantum Force line. The new 9000 and 19000 appliances were purchased with 25 Gbps transceivers, but during the migration process, we will need to use some 10 Gbps interfaces for a short period of time, only to perform the migration. Is it possible to use the transceivers from the old appliances in the network interfaces of the new ones? The transceivers are CPAC-TR-10SR-B and would be used in CPAC-8-1/10F-D cards.

The Security Appliance Accessories Guide lists only the '-D' transceivers as supported on the '-D' cards. Has anyone tried using a CPAC-TR-10SR-B transceiver on a CPAC-8-1/10F-D card?

https://www.checkpoint.com/downloads/products/check-point-appliance-accessory-guide.pdf

Thank you.

[G_W_Albrecht]

Why not ask TAC ?

[Bob_Zimmerman]

Older transceivers will work in newer cards, but they're probably not supported. That means if there's any problem with the interface, the TAC will tell you to switch to a supported transceiver before they will troubleshoot further.

From a practical standpoint, SFP transceivers are extremely simple. The transceiver part is something called a PHY. The interface MAC talks to the PHY over a standard protocol, and there are only a few variants of this protocol (SFP, SFP+, SFP28, SFP56, SFP112, etc., depending on the SerDes rate). All SFP+ transceivers, for example, talk the same protocol to the MAC.

The transceivers also include two contacts for a low-speed serial link. On old transceivers, this just includes a link to a ROM (technically an EEPROM) which contains information like the vendor, model number, serial number, and so on. This is like the SPD ROM on a DRAM module. Some vendors use the vendor identifier here to only allow their branded transceivers to work. That's not a technical limitation, it's a marketing limitation. On more recent transceivers, this informational side-channel has been extended for "digital diagnostics monitoring" (DDM), which lets extra hardware in the transceiver monitor laser power, received light level, and so on. This information is all collected via something a bit like a LOM in a server. It doesn't interact with the operation of the transceiver, it just monitors the operation.

[Gustavo_Ferreir]

I thank everyone for the responses.

I checked the list of supported transceivers and assumed that the TAC's response would be to follow the documentation. I opened this post to see if anyone had already gone through a similar scenario and tested it. In any case, I will test with the old transceivers; it will be a temporary solution just for the migration process. The correct 25G transceivers have already been acquired.

Thank you.

[Chris_Atkinson · Accepted solution]

The compatible scenarios from a TAC perspective are outlined here:

https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk92755

[the_rock]

I can tell you 100% what @Chris_Atkinson gave is an official Check Point sk about it. TAC gave it to me before as well.

Andy