[c-nsp] FIB scale on ASR9001

[Lukas Tribus]

Hello Gert,

On Thu, 11 Nov 2021 at 08:18, Gert Doering <gert at greenie.muc.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 08:27:44AM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
> > We have nothing against the forwarding performance of the ASR9001. It's
> > the control/management plane that seems to be slowing down (at least for
> > us, anyway) with newer code and a growing Internet DFZ.
>
> "newer code" might be the key issue here - what version are you on?
>
> Our 9001 have been extremely well-behaved in regards to BGP performance
> and robustness.  Not as fast as the RSP440, but still well up to the
> job.
>
> We're on 6.5.3 ("nothing interesting in newer versions, and still
> supported").

When I tested RTR on IOS-XR I hit some strange bugs in the RTR client,
specifically the RTR session would hang in certain scenarios (router
restart, RTR server reboot, etc), requiring manual intervention with a
"clear bgp rpki-server 1.2.3.4". It was *a lot* better in more recent
releases, but 6.5.3 was not part of those better releases. I still did
not have a lot of trust in XR for this reason, so I wrote a NETCONF
script that would make some sanity checks on the RTR session state on
XR boxes (nagios friendly):

https://gist.github.com/lukastribus/695c9e780d118755271519d4d3cb54f3

(minimum number of absolute v4 and v6 VRPs on each RTR server, maximum
v4/v6 VRP deviation between the RTR servers, RTR servers not in
"connected" state).


cheers,
lukas