[c-nsp] To XR or not to XR

[Per Carlson]

Hi.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 15:12, Mark Wheadon <mark at currybeast.co.uk> wrote:
> What has been people's experience of Cisco IOS XR on the 12000 series ? TAC
> have advised that12.0(33)S has been frozen in development and only bug fixes
> or security fixes will be made to the code base.

We do have one XR12k in production (running 3.6.3), and haven't seen
any particular issues so far. Now this node is doing service as a MPLS
P-router, so we are only using a minor part of the code base :-)

In the lab I'm running two XR12k-routers (3.6.3 and 3.9) as
PE-routers, and those have been stable as well.

We haven't moved on to XR on the rest of our 12k's because IOS
(12.0SY) give us the features we need. Until recently. As IPv6 is
getting momentum, we have received our first tenders for VPNv6 which
require XR. All in all, we are most likely going to XR within the next
9-12 months.

Another reason for not switching to XR where lacking support for
Channelized OC12/STM4 with SDH framing.

> I have read that XR can take substantially longer to boot compared to IOS on
> the same hardware. XR 4 is mean't to improve the boot time.

Yes, it takes about 10-15 minutes to boot a XR12k with PRP-2. XR 4.x
and PRP-3 probably will ease the pain.

-- 
Pelle

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