IOS XE is a release train of

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

' widely deployed Internetworking Operating System (IOS), introduced with the ASR 1000 series. It is built on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and provides a distributed software architecture that moves many operating system responsibilities out of the IOS process and has a copy of IOS running as a separate process. Since it runs a copy of IOS, all

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

commands are the same between Cisco IOS and IOS XE, in contrast to

IOS XR IOS XR is a release train of Cisco Systems' widely deployed Internetwork Operating System (IOS), used on their high-end Network Convergence System (NCS) and carrier-grade routers such as the ASR 9000 series and Carrier Routing System ser ...

, which has a completely different code base and whose developers implemented a different CLI command set.

Releases

IOS XE is released separately for ASR 1000 and Catalyst 3850.

Differences between IOS and IOS XE

Cisco IOS The Internetworking Operating System (IOS) is a family of proprietary network operating systems used on several router and network switch models manufactured by Cisco Systems. The system is a package of routing, switching, internetworking, and ...

is a monolithic operating system running directly on the hardware while IOS XE is a combination of a

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

and a monolithic application (IOSd) that runs on top of this kernel. On the other hand, IOS XR is based on

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early ...

(since version 5.0 it's also based on linux), where the IOSd application has been separated into many different applications. While IOS XE (IOSd) and IOS share a lot of the same code, IOS XR is a completely different code base. Since IOS XE has IOSd running as an application on top of Linux, it becomes possible to also run different applications on the hardware, a good example of this is running Wireshark on a switch. Another example is the Cisco IOS XE Open Service Containers.

References

External links

Cisco Content Hub

Cisco Feature Navigator
* {{official, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/ios-nx-os-software/ios-xe/index.html Cisco products

Releases

Differences between IOS and IOS XE

See also

References

External links