[c-nsp] IPv4/v6 Route Reflectors - Which router to choose?

[Łukasz Bromirski]

On 2010-06-12 11:55, Gert Doering wrote:

>> I noticed that Cisco had put ASR1002 on the candidate list for BGP RR
>> (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9343/index.html). While the
>> ASRs are powerful and mighty, they seem to be somewhat over the top
>> for the job. It also seems like the 7200/7300, even the 7600 platform
>> is normal to find as RRs too.
> I wouldn't use a 7600 as RR.  The CPU is slow, and the powerful hardware
> forwarding engine is not needed here.

With the number of changes in the BGP and CEF code, 12.2(33)SRE1 on
7600 and RSP720 may be good enough for a couple of hundred of
neighbors.

But ASR1k is currently the fastest and most scalable RR available
commercially. Equipped with RP2 and 16GB of RAM it can scale up to
around 29M prefixes in IPv4 table if FIB selective download is used.
It was validated some time ago by ISOCORE and in numerous live
tests:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9343/ITD13029-ASR1000-RP2Validationv1_1.pdf

> The 7301 or 7201 (=7200 + NPE-G1 or NPE-G2) would make a good RR - the
> CPU is (for a Cisco router) fairly fast, the IOS is mature (don't use
> anything with letters on it), and they can take enough RAM for large
> BGP tables.

For 7301/7201 try to keep either to 12.2(33)SRE1 line or 12.2(31)/(33)SB.
The latter are EoS/EoLing as we speak but most of the new optimization
features also did appear in them.

>> How would the upper end for the ISR G2 routers perform as IPvXrrs? The
>> 3925s, 3945s, etc.
> No idea, but last time I checked, the 39xx were more expensive than a
> 7301...

3925/3945 will perform better, however not every BGP feature is
currently available for 15.0M train (it will be eventually of course,
as first images from 15.1T are starting to ship).

-- 
"Everything will be okay in the end.  |                 Łukasz Bromirski
  If it's not okay, it's not the end." |      http://lukasz.bromirski.net