[c-nsp] 7206vxr/300 vs 7507/rsp4

[Jon Lewis]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Eric Kagan wrote:

> any direct comparisons of actual performance between a 7507/RSP4 and a
> 7206VXR/300 and/or 7026 non VXR/200 NPE ?  (Like you had a 7200 running a
> job at XX CPU, etc and replaced it with similar 7500 config and it ran aat
> XX CPU...)  I am looking to run a border router (4-5 BGP Full Feed w/ peers)
> with 2 or 3 Fast Ethernet handoffs sustaining around 60-80MB/sec and wants
> thoughts on which device is best for this job.  I hear a lot of xx router is

I think a NPE200 is out of the question due to its 128mb RAM limit.  You
won't get 4 (probably not even 1 or 2) full BGP feeds into 128mb on a
7206.

Is that 60-80mbits a total of all the FEs, and do you expect much growth
over time?

Having done the migration of 7206VXR -> 7500 (RSP4/VIP2-50s) -> 6509
(SUP2/MSFC2/PFC2), I'd say save yourself the aggravation and if the $ is
there, go straight to the 6509.  On the 7500s, we started having trouble
when single FE interfaces got anywhere near full (actually, not really
even near full...they just had trouble in general).  HSRP over ISL
works...we did it for a while.  If you have many VLANs, keep in mind the
VIP2 can't handle many virtual MAC addresses, so you have to play some
games to get around that.

The 6509 though won't even notice if you have a full FE or a few GEs doing
FE level traffic.  It'll give you much more room for growth than a VXR or
7500.  And if you ever do run out of power on it, you can turn it into a
7600/SUP720.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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