[j-nsp] Upgrade from M10i?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 06:35:34PM +0100, sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:
> Given the requirement of full BGP routes, I don't believe the EX
> platform is an acceptable alternative...

Well, that all depends what you want to do with the BGP routes. The EX
has more than enough CPU and RAM to take a full table or two and do
something useful with it, you just can't install more than 12k unicast
routes into TCAM for hardware forwarding. Of course since Juniper has a
policy-statement option sitting between the RIB to FIB export, you could 
very easily export a limited number of routes to hw (i.e. default 
routes) while still handling full BGP at a protocol level.

Or at least you could, if this functionality wasn't crippled in
software. Even though the small EX's have 1GB of DRAM, there is a rlimit
on rpd memory somewhere around 80MB which causes it to coredump if you
use too much memory. I can't quite tell if this is just someone being
silly (assuming you'll never need more ram with only 12k routes), or if
this is being done intentionally to cripple the product so it can't be
used as a route reflector (*) (even after you buy a BGP license). Either
way it's a horrible disservice to the product, since this could be used
to solve the classic "how to support full bgp on a top-of-rack L3
aggregation switch" problem without resorting to ghetto Cogentesque 2
BGP session hackery. If you think this would be useful, please ask 
Juniper to remove the crippling rlimit and let the device handle full 
routes.

(*) On the subject of route reflectors, has anybody else noticed that 
even though they fixed the long standing slow FIB install bug in most 
platforms around JUNOS 8.5, it is still happening on J-series boxes? We 
were trying to use them as RR's, but found this old bug still alive and 
well, ironically on the platform that doesn't actually have a hardware 
FIB to install to. Also to be filed under Irony, the O-series has no 
such problem, and makes a very snappy route reflector. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)