During a recent network upgrade, I inserted a third-party transceiver into one of my Cisco 3850 Catalyst switches and received the following message “Unsupported transceiver found in Te1/1/1”.
Instead of purchasing very expensive OEM transceivers (at a price difference of 8560%), I ran the following two commands from the switch CLI in “conf t” mode, to allow third-party transceivers to work in the switch.
service unsupported-transceiver no errdisable detect cause gbic-invalid
You will receive the following warning message.
Warning: When Cisco determines that a fault or defect can be traced to the use of third-party transceivers installed by a customer or reseller, then, at Cisco's discretion, Cisco may withhold support under warranty or a Cisco support program. In the course of providing support for a Cisco networking product Cisco may require that the end user install Cisco transceivers if Cisco determines that removing third-party parts will assist Cisco in diagnosing the cause of a support issue.
Make sure you remember to save the changes to the configuration otherwise the transceivers will stop working if the switch reboots. You will probably also need to shutdown and then re-enable the interface for it to be detected correctly. I still occasionally get the ‘unsupported’ message when reseating the transceivers, but shutdown-no shutdown brings them back online.
My recommendation for third party transceivers that won’t break the bank is Fibre Store.