Can 2 supervisor engine's ports both work at same time?

Question

As I know that, when 1 supervisor engine is working, another engine's ports are totally down in redundancy mode .
Is there any way to let 2 supervisor engine's ports are both working at same time?

Answer 1

The two supervisor engines in a redundant supervisor engine configuration have different responsibilities. The active supervisor engine is responsible for controlling the system bus and all line cards. All protocols are running on the active supervisor engine and it performs all packet forwarding. The standby supervisor engine does not communicate with the line cards. It receives packets from the network and populates its forwarding tables with this information, but does not participate in any packet forwarding. The relevant protocols on the system are initialized, but not active, on the standby supervisor engine. The Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series supervisor engines are hot-swappable and the standby supervisor engine can be installed in a running, active system. Also please note that redundant supervisor engines do not perform load sharing. The active supervisor engine is providing the entire packet-forwarding intelligence for the system (N+1 redundancy). If the active supervisor engine fails, the standby supervisor engine can still maintain the same system load.
The standby supervisor engine polls the active supervisor engine through the Ethernet out-of-band channel (EOBC) every 5 to10 milliseconds to monitor the online status of the active supervisor engine. The active supervisor engine might go offline for a variety of reasons such as hardware failures, system overload conditions, memory corruption issues, removal from chassis, being reset by the operator, or real-time diagnostics-driven supervisor switchover (also known as Generic Online Diagnostics) 1. The standby supervisor engine detects this type of failure and becomes the new active supervisor engine. The Catalyst OS software on the supervisor engine is responsible for restoring the protocols, line cards, and forwarding engines to normal operation. This restoration takes place through a fast switchover or a high-availability switchover.
HTH