[j-nsp] MX960 JunOS recommendations

[Andrei Radu]

Thank you all for all the information, and thank you Richard for
taking the time to elaborate. We're going to use 9.3R4.4 mainly
because of the E-EOL (and that fact that it has all the features we
need :) ).

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 5:43 AM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:
> 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)
>



-- 
Andrei

"2+2=5, for extremely large values of 2 !"