[c-nsp] ASR opinions..

[Mack McBride]

There is a feature to prevent control plane routes from installing in the FIB for route reflectors.
This feature is designed for BGP route reflection in a VPN environment.
You can carry significant numbers of routes on multiple VPNs in this configuration
since the VPNs don't exists on all routers they don't need to be reflected everywhere.

Mack


-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Mark Tinka
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 10:31 AM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] ASR opinions..

On Thursday, August 25, 2011 02:46:27 PM Matt Moor wrote:

> To my eye, the ASR1001 looks like a better option now that it's 
> available - it's an intel based platform (ala RP2), albeit less 
> powerful (Core Duo vs Xeon), with something like the equivalent of an 
> ESP5 inside it.
> Talking to a few Cisco folk about it seriously (a few months ago) more 
> or less confirmed this. The 1002F apparently had some market pressure 
> driving it to availability before RP2 was ready to go, and the 1001 
> very much "feels" like an RP2 version of it (for those of us in the 
> Ethernet world, anyhoo).
> 
> I left the company before we ended up deploying some, but the due 
> diligence had born out to that point.

Agree that the ASR1001 is certainly excellent on paper. We run 7201's as route reflectors here since 2008, and we're very happy that we're considering the ASR1001's as a potential replacement. It's just that the ASR1001 will only install 512,000 entries into the FIB, and we're not yet sure what a control-plane only router (route reflector role) will do when we exceed this maximum. In theory, there shouldn't be any issue since decisions are made in the RIB first.

We have some 7201's in the edge that could have been changed to ASR1001's, but this 512,000 FIB entry limitation is a real PITA.

The ASR1001 is on the right track, now we just need Cisco to fix that FIB issue, although something tells me they won't for fear of displacing the larger boxes in this series.

Cheers,

Mark.