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

[Pete Lumbis]

> 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.


This isn't entirely true. Most of the letters indicate BU specific builds
for hardware support. Only the "T" train isn't considered as stable as the
mainline release. The other thing to remember is that the components in a
train are the same code (for the most part).




> I wouldn't use a 7600 as RR.  The CPU is slow, and the powerful hardware
> > forwarding engine is not needed here.
>
> Actually, BGP on anything up to a SUP720-3BXL *sucks*, because the CPU
> crawls along. Feels like my grandma without the steroids.
>

I would second this. The 7600 is a hardware based platform. It can move
packets very fast but it wasn't designed to have the CPU for a lot of
software operations. If you are running a RR it's only job is to maintain
the BGP RIB. Given that the CPU of a sup720 is not going to give you the
performance you  would get from a 7200 + NPE-G2 for example.


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:
>

The ASR will do a great job as an RR providing more than enough memory and
CPU to do the job.