[c-nsp] To XR or not to XR

[Frederic LOUI]

Hi Mark,

Besides what has been said so far... One thing that is most of the time 
overlooked...
Make sure that your staff (Ops / engineers etc.) are *VERY* 
familiar/comfortable with not only IOS-XR configuration but also IOS-XR 
hardware management ...
(Or make sure you have CISCO support... If you can afford it ...)

Because the learning curve for discovering the platform is significant. 
For instance, the IOX software upgrade principle can avoid rebooting the 
box itself, but don't think this will be always the case ...
Indeed some packages need the BOX to be rebooted , others don't ... And 
for some reasons if you apply a series of packages that do not require a 
reboot => The box reboot !
Also, if you have CRS-1, IOX between these 2 platforms seem not to be 
aligned in terms of feature set.

In addition, make sure that your network management system  can manage 
these boxes...
We took the latter "as granted" and for some reason we had troubles with 
the network management process performance in IOX ...

In the positive side:
1) IOX on 12K is quite stable (we're running 10s of these boxes since 2 
years as P/PE with full-routing table IPv4/IPv6 unicast/multicast and 
other MPLS services so far without any single issue).
2) RPL is a very powerful and flexible mechanism that allows you to 
elaborate complex routing policy.
3) You'll benefit some nice security features such as Management Plane 
Protection, LPTS (granted that in IOS you can have receive ALC / CoPP)
4) New features, BGP-PIC, 6VPE for instance will only see the light in 
IOX for these platform.

Good luck if you go for it :-)
Frederic

Mark Wheadon a écrit :
> 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.
>
> 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.
> Flash Memory requirements have grown from 512meg of ram to 2G on the 
> latest release of software (3.9).
> TAC give the impression that XR on 12000 series hasn't been widely 
> adopted.
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