[c-nsp] Cisco Friends

[Simon Leinen]

Gert Doering writes:
> On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 02:09:18PM +0200, Simon Leinen via cisco-nsp wrote:
>> [Mark Tinka writes:]
>> > I'd be keen to hear what your experience running IOS XR on the NCS540
>> > (especially if it's in a high-volume metro setting) has been.
>> 
>> Works nicely, like on the bigger routers (NCS-55A1 / Cisco 8000) as far
>> as I can tell.  We're using a relatively small feature set (IPv4+IPv6
>> routing, OSPFv2/v3+BGP, limited MPLS for L2 VPNS) and small routing
>> tables.  Our configurations tend to be rather static, and we mostly use
>> old-style management protocols (SNMP/SSH/CLI).

> Are IOS XR upgrades still such a pain today?  (We never moved to XR64,
> and all I know is ASR9001, where the fastest way to do major upgrades
> still is "turbo boot" with 2+ hours of downtime...)

In XR7 there's "install replace" which is relatively simple and fast,
though the .iso images it uses can be quite big (580MB to 2GB depending
on platform).  So not as quick as IOS, but quite a bit better than your
experience with earlier IOS-XR versions.

> This is one of the nice bits about IOS, IOS XE, EOS, etc. - "upload one 
> image onto the box, reload, upgrade done" (and on EOS, the flash is
> actually fast enough to make the "upload" really use available bandwidth
> to the box...)

XR7's install replace can install directly from ftp:// URLs.  From what
my teammates say, copying/writing to flash still seems slow though.

The NCS540 (using IOS-XR) actually reboot faster than the ASR920s (IOS-XE).

Cheers,
-- 
Simon.