[c-nsp] ASR 99xx IOS-XR images are all EoL/EoS?

[James Jun]

Hi,

> 
> Besides that we have been very happy with the 9906's and IOS-XR 64bit.

Similar situation here.  We ordered our first ASR9906 back in August 31, 2017 when it went FCS, received it in November where it was shipped to us with 6.3.1.

We took a really long time to put this device into production, due to delays on the new facilities we were commissioning; by the time we placed it into production in July 2018, we launched with eXR 6.4.2 on two ASR9906s.

So far, for our relatively basic use cases (igp, bgp, mpls, l2vpn, l3vpn), eXR 6.4.2 has been surprisingly stable.  The only bug we ran into was a superfluous one where Cha-FPGA will refuse to FPD-upgrade on one of the RPs.  Cisco provided an SMU which fixed the issue.

I also have an ASR9901 running eXR 6.4.2 for doing some peering -- so far so good.  The only superfluous difference I saw with ASR9901 is that 9901 does not accept deprecated show bgp commands ('sh ip bgp' is no longer valid, you have to type 'sh bgp ipv4 unicast'), even though it's running same eXR 6.4.2 version.  On 9906 running eXR 6.4.2, deprecated BGP show commands still work.

With eXR 6.4.2, we also began rolling support for Large BGP Communities on route-policies.  This is working well and works backward-compatible with classic BGP communities within the same RPL policy, so no problems so far.

So overall, we've been happy camper with eXR 6.4.2 on ASR9K platforms in general.  I do have a new box coming with 6.5.15 (Lightspeed kit), so we'll see how that goes when the order ships next year.

I'm not sure that I could sing the same happiness about IOS XE platforms lately though (ASR1002-HX in particular)... been having lot of stability issues & bug hits on XE platforms so far.  Even recent IOS XE code for ASR920 is starting to get really annoying (e.g. mpls fast-reroute completely broken on 3.16.07S, etc).  ASR1002-HX only supports new unified (Everest/Denali/whatever that is) code and the box is crashing after placing 9Gb/s of traffic onto it (never crashed during burn-in sit).  TAC is suspecting HW issue and sending RMA, so we'll see.

I feel like first generation ASR920s running 3.16.04S is the most stable ever for 920 platform.  For now I'm afraid of touching the new 12x10G ASR920s that just came out.

James