[c-nsp] Number of route reflectors, best practice?

[Mark Tinka]

On Sunday, July 24, 2011 07:47:58 PM Gert Doering wrote:

> Mmmh, good point.  Can't have enough RAM on a RR.

Of course, our concern is whether the new generation of RE's 
from Juniper will include support for the M120 so we can get 
that 16GB RAM support in the future. Otherwise it makes the 
M120 an expensive option within a given period of time.

> I wonder whether anyone is running RRs on "off-the-shelf"
> PCs with BIRD today...  reasonable mid-range server,
> quad-core CPU, 16G RAM, Linux or FreeBSD on it... 
> should be cheaper than just the route-server- license
> for JunOS, let alone the hardware needed.

The "Advanced BGP License", IIRC, is only required on 
Juniper's J-series routers (makes no sense to me, but...). 
However, I probably wouldn't recommend anyone use the J-
series as a route reflector, for a number of reasons.

Meanwhile, a new RE for Juniper's M7i/M10i routers will soon 
become available, and this should bring 16GB of RAM to these 
entry-level M-series routers. Certainly, having an M7i as a 
route reflector from the Juniper side of things is much 
better than an M120 or MX240.

> (As Bird seems to be the #1 choice for route-servers at
> IXPs, which uses different protocol families but has
> much more demanding requirements than "just a RR").

We generally prefer the Cisco 7201 as a route reflector 
(which would send us to the ASR1001 as an upgrade path, 
despite the 512,000 FIB entry support), but we wanted to 
support the MCAST-VPN AFI (for LSM) which only the Juniper 
supports today. So it was a case of:

	1. M7i + 7201 = route reflector, or
	2. M120 = route reflector

The choice was easy, although hard :-).

Cheers,

Mark.
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