[j-nsp] Experience with J series

[Chris Kawchuk]

> The purpose is to build a mission-critical Internet access with two  
> ISP (one
> on each box running full table) and have a VRRP fault tolerance and  
> with a
> small budget. It is not for pushing huge traffic, I expect around 1  
> to 3
> Mbit average and some rare peaks at 8 - 10 Mbit during backup  
> timeframes.

No Problem. J2350's are capable of this easily. e/iBGP with full  
tables, VRRP on the inside interface.
Processing 8-10mbit/sec would hardly "sweat" the box.

> The features I will be using are firewall (< 30 ACLs), BGP, OSPF  
> (both IPv4
> and IPv6) and maybe one VPN tunnel + QoS (?).

Yep. 30 ACL's with no issues (assuming straightforward things). Full  
BGP Tables, OSPF area 0.0.0.0 inside, QoS, IPSEC.

> According to the technical datasheet, this gear supports 1 GB of  
> DRAM and
> handle a maximum ~ 300k BGP routes.

I've seen much more in 1 Gb of RAM.; however 300k routes is fine for  
the global routing table. (which is ~290k or so). You'd have room-to- 
spare.

> I have seen in some lists that these models now can be upgraded to 2  
> GB of
> DRAM with just no issue. Some people report having had successful  
> experience
> handling 500k routes with these littles gears.

Yes. I've worked with J4350's and J6350's with 2 Gb of RAM, holding 2  
complete eBGP tables each and an iBGP table. for a total of 800k  
routes. Also seen it (by misconfiguration) hold 1.2 Million routes in  
BGP/inet.0.

> I am just looking after some experience with them in this kind of
> environment. By the way, does this box include any GUI software to  
> maintain
> firewall ACLs?

Full GUI supported (web-Gui on the box) - however, as always, the  
power is in the command line. JunOS is easy to use, easy to learn, and  
"makes sense" from a command-line configuration perspective.

- Chris.