ontext and, assuming you're used to PIX firewalls, everything should look very familiar: Switch-I0S-FWSM/EComm#sho int Interface Vlan20 "outside", is up, line protocol is up MAC address 0008.4cff.b403, MTU 1500 IP address 10.1.1.1, subnet mask 255.255.255.0 Received 90083941155 packets, 6909049206185 bytes Transmitted 3710031826 packets, 1371444635 bytes Dropped 156162887 packets Architecture Interface Vlan30 "inside", is up, line protocol is up MAC address 0008.4cff.b403, MTU 1500 IP address 10.10.10.1, subnet mask 255.255.255.0 Received 156247369908 packets, 214566399699153 bytes Transmitted 2954364369 packets, 7023125736 bytes Dropped 14255735 packets CSMs. The CSMs from Cisco are an excellent alternative to standalone content switches. The CSM is capable of 4 Gbps of throughput and is available with an SSL accelerator daughter card. The CSMs have been replaced with the newer fabric-enabled ACE module. CSM integration with the 6500 running native IOS is very smooth. All of the CSM commands are included in the switch's CLI. The commands for the CSM are included under the module CSM module# command. The command expands to the full module contentswitchingmodule module# in the configuration: Switch-IOS (config) #mod csm 9 Switch-IOS (config-module-csm)# One big drawback of CSMs is that they are not fabric-enabled. While this is not an issue in terms of the throughput of the blade itself, it becomes an issue if the switch containing the CSM will also be serving the servers being balanced. The CSM is a Gbps blade. Inserting it into a switch that is using the fabric backplane will cause supervisor to revert to bus mode instead of faster modes such as dCEF. A switch with a Supervisor-720, fabric-only Ethernet modules, and a CSM will not run at 720 Gbps, because of the CSM's limited backplane connections. CSM blades will operate in a stateful failover design. The pair of CSMs can sync their configurations, provided they are running version 4.2(1) or later. They can be synced with the hw-module csm module# standby confi