[c-nsp] ASR9K limitations

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, MKS wrote:

> I would like to ask you, what was most surprising about the platform, 
> e.g. I expected that to be there, or this is a strange limitation. Does 
> the ASR9K halv the tcam space like 7600 when enabling uRPF?

Distribute-list only accepts access-list, not route-map (in 4.2.1).

"install" sucks. Cisco seems to treat upgrading/installing as an 
afterthought. Developers seem to re-install ("turbo boot" in 
cisco-speak)all the time, so installing upgrades is troublesome and breaks 
way too often (upgrading from 4.2.0 right now to 4.2.1 fails to pass 
"install verify"). There is a Severity 1 (catastrophic) bug (CSCua50217) 
filed on this and fix is coming, but I don't see how this could have 
passed even basic Q&A.

Code is stable once it's up and running, but getting there and handling 
their packages (SMUs and PIEs) is a pain. When you do a total cost 
analysis, include 5-10 man-hours per year per device just to handle 
upgrades. Make sure anyone who needs to work with upgrades of the platform 
in the future gets to understand this part of operations well and that 
they're comfortable with it. Coming from vanilla IOS where it's "copy 
file, change boot statement and reboot" this can be quite a shock.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se