Michael McNamara

The Nortel ERS 5500 Series switches support Layer 3 switching (routing) but only with static routes. The Advanced Routing License is required to provide the following features;

• OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) Routing
• VRRP (Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol)
• ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path)
• SMLT (Split Multilink Trunking)
• IPFIX (IP Flow Information Export)

The license is based on a switch or stack - a single license will be required for a standalone switch or for a stack of up to eight units. A single license will enable all of the features described above.

I believe Nortel is selling the licenses in counts of 1, 10, 50 or 100. The licenses will be tied to the MAC address of the switch with some amount of flexibility should a switch fail or need to be replaced.

Did you know that there is a 30 day demo license available?

As of software release v5.1 there is a 30 day demo license available which you can load on the switch to evaluate the different features. I'm currently running two ERS 5500 series switches with the 30 day demo license testing the OSPF functionality.

The 30 day demo license can be found on Nortel website just below the v5.1 software release. Once you've retrieved the demo license (filename: 30daydemo.lic) you'll need to place it on a TFTP server (or you could try a USB flash drive if your working with an ERS 5530 switch).

ERS5530> enable
ERS5530# copy tftp license 10.101.20.1 30daydemo.lic

You would of course need to substitute your TFTP server IP address with 10.101.20.1 above. Once you've downloaded the license you'll need to restart the switch to activate the license. After the switch has restarted you can use the following command to check the license;

ERS5530#show license all
Number of licenses: 1
---------------------------------------------------------
License 1
---------------------------------------------------------
version: 0
md5_key: 9f8d802b 1459576e 7d0b8951 af8e1751
md5_file: 8375fe89 ea7eb5e2 fa155e7a 181410c8
time_base: 2007/06/22 08:19:01
time_modify: 2007/06/22 08:19:01
time_expiration: 28 days, 05:05:00
num_unique_ids: 1
flags: 0x0000000d SINGLE EXPIRE EMERGENCY
memo:

*** This is a temporary license valid for 30 days. A valid license is ***
*** required for uninterrupted operation of the switch. There may be ***
*** service impact if this temporary license is not removed in 30 days. ***

You can also delete the existing software licenses with the following command;

ERS5530# clear license all

Cheers!