[cisco-nas] Offload PPPoE processing from DSL aggregation 7206 toanother 7206?

[Scott Lambert]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 05:40:08AM +0200, Oliver Boehmer (oboehmer) wrote:
> Scott Lambert <> wrote on Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:40 AM:
> 
> > I have about 1000 PPPoE users on an 7206vxr with NPE400.  The CPU
> > load is at about 75% according to the MRTG 1 and 5 minute averages.
> > According to sho proc cpu, the load is much higher than that for tens
> > of seconds at a time.  I'm thinking that is about as high a load as I
> > want on a router.
> 
> Right, looks too high.
> Are you terminating PPPoE (over ATM) directly on the box, or are you
> terminating PPP sessions forwarded to you via L2TP?
 
Sorry, it is PPPoE over ATM.

> > I have another 500 users I need to migrate over from aquisition of
> > another ISP.  My connection to the Telco is an OC3 and the migrated
> > user will be brought in over the same OC3.
> 
> If you terminate the PPPoE sessions directly, you definitly need a
> faster hardware. You could still forward the sessions via L2TP, but this
> will not really decrease the load compared to if you terminated them
> directly..

I would like to thank everyone for their advice.  I will be
investigating what it takes to do the L2TP to a cluster of *nix boxes.
If it doesn't take the same amount of horsepower to go from the ATM to
an L2TP tunnel(s) as it does to go from ATM to PPPoE, it sounds like a
nice idea for future scaleablility.

I now have an NPE-G1 on order.  I hope that will hold us until we run
out of bandwidth on the ATM OC3.  Or, at least, until it's feasible to
get another circuit we can terminate in a seperate box.

-- 
Scott Lambert                    KC5MLE                       Unix SysAdmin
lambert at lambertfam.org