[j-nsp] Transfer some task from MX to VRR

[Ben Dale]

On 2 Dec 2014, at 12:41 am, Robert Hass <robhass at gmail.com> wrote:

>> I think vMX can forward data.
> 
> vMX indeed will be full-featured router. But my questions was related to
> move part of control-plane (basically whole BGP part of rpd) to external
> server. Maybe OpenFlow somehow helps here ? How openflow take care of eBGP
> to customers ? Session should be on router or on OpenFlow controller ? OF
> v1.3 just has been implemented in JunOS 14.x releases for MX series.

This is completely doable without the need for Openflow.

The vMX is delivered as two VMs - a vRE and vPFE and logically they communicate in the same way as the RE and PFE do in an MX today eg: an internal ethernet switch sends control-plane information down to the forwarding engine.

Whether this happens on a single host machine across a vSwitch, or across a physical network is now completely irrelevant, normal constraints not withstanding (congestion/loss etc).  

It's not a big stretch to imagine being able to one day ditch the vPFE and take a bunch of "head-less" MXs (hardware-based) acting as remote FPCs to a pair of centralised vREs - like JCS/TXM but on more commoditised server hardware, or even a Q-Fabric with MXs as nodes and commodity directors/interconnect.  

Given that control-plane traffic is pretty minimal, and with all the cool FIB localisation knobs coming down in 14.x, the scaling/design implications of this get pretty interesting.

Heck - it should be possible to one day take the much-maligned MX80 RE and replace it with a remote intel-based monster, and get 64-bit Junos in the mix.

Emulating the backplane for inter-FPC traffic is going to be a barrel of fun though!

Ben