[c-nsp] ipv6 on a sup32?

[Christian MacNevin]

Thanks Gert.

Another question I guess I should check is regarding how it'll handle the ipv6 routing. It'll
be acting as L2 aggregator, which to me suggests we need to have ipv6 VACLs. That supported well
enough on the 65 platform?

I'll definitely ask the VAR about the low end sup720 option as well, though I'm trying to keep this as low as possible so I don't have to do a 3750 with a 7200 router-on-a-stick configuration.




-----Original Message-----
From: Gert Doering [mailto:gert at greenie.muc.de] 
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 2:18 PM
To: Christian MacNevin
Cc: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] ipv6 on a sup32?

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 07, 2010 at 12:03:20PM -0700, Christian MacNevin wrote:
> I'm considering whether it's worth going from a 3750 configuration as 
> a low-end site core router to a
> 6504/sup32 config. The key here really being that I want better 
> exposure to ipv6 routing and features should we need them.
> 
> Is this realistic? Anybody done it or have any caveats?

Well.  The Sup32 has a big bag of caveats, but so has the 3750.

The Sup32 has a darn slow CPU, so it will take half an eternity (~12 minutes) to *boot*.  This can be highly frustrating.  Furthermore, if you use it for "large BGP things" (even within its limits of 256 k TCAM entries), things can be slow, or overload the CPU (if you have multiple BGP peers and large updates going on).

When shuffling packets, the Sup32 is limited by the "shared bus" - no crossbar fabric on it, so you can't use the more powerful cards with the Sup32.  OTHO the bus is 32gbit/s fast, so that should suffice for any scenarios where you'd consider a 3750.

Routing-wise, the Sup32 is a "full" router - full BGP, IPv6 forwarded in hardware, MPLS, netflow support for IPv4 and IPv6 (netflow v9), etc.

It cannot do a few things (netflow with TCP flags, certain IPv6 packets are routed in software, ...) but all these are things you can't do on a 3750 anyway.

Another nice plus is that the buffers on the Sup32 and on the more reasonable cat6k interface modules are not as limited as on the 3750 (and 2960) series...

So - from a "what is there today in both boxes", I'd go for 6504+Sup32.


What is sort of hard to guess is how long the Sup32 will continue to be supported.  Cisco seems to be really hating this piece of hardware - it was originally planned to be upgradeable with a larger TCAM to hold the "full 1 million XL routing table" (and still is), but you can't buy it and it's not supported - so it might no longer work.  OTOH, the Sup2+Fabric still has no reasonable successor for "mostly layer 2" switching, because the Sup32 has no fabric (and can't use the S2 fabric), so it's unclear what its future might be...

gert
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