[j-nsp] J Series - BGP Peering Router?

[Paul Stewart]

Thanks very much for the feedback.. I've received a few offline replies as
well.

To clarify the "small nature" of this application - we would be sending
about 65 iBGP routes to the box and receiving about 4000 eBGP routes.  It's
for a small peering pop/exchange point.

Having said that, if I thought it would work we'd take some J6350's and dump
some much larger tables for 600-800Mb/s applications involving about 20k
routes or even maybe full tables depending on the application.... the
feedback has been "mixed" so far to say the least ;)

Travelling at the moment but going to fire up this handy J2320 I have laying
around and dump a full table to it ... like to flap it a few times etc. and
see what happens with 10.x loaded on it.

Richard, I've heard you mention the rib/fib installation bug a few times but
never seen it yet (we're slowly entering the Juniper world from Cisco).  Is
there anything documented on this issue or more details we can look up
somewhere?

Best regards,

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard A Steenbergen [mailto:ras at e-gerbil.net] 
Sent: April-22-10 3:28 PM
To: Paul Stewart
Cc: juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [j-nsp] J Series - BGP Peering Router?

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:30:30PM -0400, Paul Stewart wrote:
> Hi there..
> 
> I have a couple of applications pop up recently where I think a
> J-Series might suffice for BGP peering.  The application is a small
> peering POP doing about 200Mb/s of traffic, about 50 BGP peers, and
> total routes is roughly 4000 total.

In our experience w/J-series running the old/regular JUNOS (can't speak
to JUNOS-ES, which is really more of an integration of security features
to make J-series a mini-SRX), this would probably be a bad idea (I'm
assuming you mean more than 4000 routes, since you mention 400k later in
the email). We evaluated J-series for use as route reflectors, and found
that they suffer GREATLY from the ye olde slow rib/fib installation bug. 
What might take a few minutes to install under extraordinary conditions
like coming up from a fresh restart on M/T/MX could take 30 minutes to
in some cases HOURS to install on J-series. When I asked Juniper people
about it, they basically said "we don't really support/recommend
J-series for this application, and the software is heavily optimized 
towards providing packet forwarding performance at the expense of bgp 
performance". Of course they said that AFTER we spent money on those 
stupid route reflector software licenses, which they continue to sell 
even though the box is completely unusable as a route reflector. :)

YMMV but on J-series running JUNOS as of 9.3R4 the only words I can use
to describe loading up a lot of bgp routes/neighbors is "epic disaster". 
Maybe JUNOS-ES is better or different or something, I dunno.

-- 
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)