[j-nsp] MX960 JunOS recommendations

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 03:39:32PM +0200, Andrei Radu wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> We will be installing our first Juniper MX960 router in the network.
> We were a 100% Cisco shop and this is our first Juniper router. The MX
> will be a P/PE node
> in a pretty standard MPLS backbone network surrounded by Cisco 7600
> routers, running OSPF, MPLS/LDP, BGP and PIM sparse-mode, no layer 2
> or layer 3 VPNs whatsoever. Equal cost load-balancing over multiple
> 10GE links is a must. Does anyone have a recommendation for a stable
> JunOS version to run ? I'm currently looking at 9.5 or 9.6, I see that
> 10.0 came out on the 4th of November but from our experience with
> Cisco IOS releases we are reluctant to use the latest & greatest
> release.

For MX I'd say 9.3R4 for the conservative (we have loads of experience
running this, 9.3R3+ was the first release without major showstopper
bugs ON in well over a year before it, and 9.3R4 only made it better),
9.4R3 for the middle of the road (we've been running this on many
routers for a few months now, only a relatively modest amount of grief
and probably nothing you'd notice if you have to ask this question),
9.5R3 for the adventuresome (some major bugs in 9.5R1 but we're
currently baking 9.5R3 on a couple production routers and haven't seen
any issues thus far). 9.5 does have some scripting enhancements and
optimizations which are noticable, so if you're big on those it might be
worth a try. I don't currently have the testicular fortitude to try 9.6
outside of the lab (where all the real bugs are found :P), though I am
looking forward to the ISSU support for RSVP. For the super conservative
9.2R4 is relatively light on the pfe and counter bugs (unlike earier
revs of 9.2), but still has quite a few other unfixable issues until you
go to 9.3+ (like netconf and commit scripts will not play together at
all). 

I didn't used to put JUNOS in the "you should really wait until R3
before you touch it" category, but given recent history I don't think
it's an irrational stance to take until they re-establish their track
record of putting out non catastrophically broken code on a regular
basis.

-- 
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)