IOS XE is a
release train of
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...
' widely deployed
Internetworking Operating System (IOS), introduced with the
ASR 1000 series.
It is built on
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
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, 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
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American ...
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 software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...
and a monolithic application (IOSd) that runs on top of this kernel. On the other hand, IOS XR is based on
QNX (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.
See also
*
Cisco NX-OS
References
External links
Cisco Content HubCisco Feature Navigator* {{official, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/ios-nx-os-software/ios-xe/index.html
Cisco products