Cisco C3750X vs C3750E Switches

Cisco has, fairly recently, made end of life a number of older 3750 switches end of life. The way forward with the 3X50 series are the C3750X and the C3850 switches and this depends on your exact features required as well as if you want to do unified access (CAPWAP termination on controllers built into access layer switches - and that's another story!). But the reason for my post is to document some of differences between the C3750E (end of life) and C3750X (the recommended replacement). This post focuses on how the C3750E and C3750X are different and similar.

The C3750X is very similar to the C3750E except it is more feature rich. They are both built on the same ASICs and switch fabric and both employ stackwise plus, so you can have stacks consisting of E and X switches. There are, however, a number of features available in the C3750X switches not available in the C3750E:

• Four optional uplink network modules with GE or 10GE ports
• PoE+ with 30W power on all ports in 1 rack unit (RU) form factor
• Dual redundant, modular power supplies and fans
• Cisco StackPower technology
• Media Access Control Security (MACsec) hardware-based encryption
• Flexible NetFlow and switch-to-switch hardware encryption with the Service Module
• USB Type-A and Type-B ports for storage and console
• Three software feature sets: LAN Base, IP Base, and IP Services(LAN Base is not available on the 3750E series)

There aren't any features on the E which isn't on the X, the only items which are worth considering are the 10Gigabit Ethernet modules - The C3750E has them built in where as the C3750X requires an additional module, the 10Gigabit interfaces are also different, X2 and SFP+. Lastly the backup is different - The C3750E uses RPS2300 where as the C3750X uses the XPS2200.

As a bonus, as long as the IOS is the same and a 10Gigabit module is installed the configurations should be compatible, I've not tested it but the theory is most definately there.