[j-nsp] ACX is just not there (was Re: EX4550 L2Circuit/VPN to MX80/lt Interface)

[Phil Bedard]

Yes they don't really fit will with metro fiber rings unless everything is 
indoors, you certainly wouldn't deploy them at a cell tower or outdoor 
enclosure.  Really today the ALU 7210, ACX, ME3600, etc. are cheaper 
anyways.  

The vMX really has two flavors, one for low speed and one for high speed.  
The high speed one uses the Intel DPDK/SR-IOV and can push about 80Gbps 
half duplex doing normal routing.   ALU has the same thing and claims they 
can do 320Gbps half-duplex but 32x10G ports would need like an 8RU server 
:).  ALU a demo coming up with a bunch of servers in a rack managed as a 
single router supporting about 2Tbps of throughput.  They call those vMX, 
vSR, etc. but they aren't such that you could run 50 of them on a server.  
They require direct access to the 10G hardware.    

Now the caveat is once you start throwing firewall filters, policing, NAT, 
64-byte packets, etc. the performance drops significantly, but for 512+ 
byte packets it's still pretty good unless you are doing a ton of stuff.  

There are companies like Advantech starting to sell 20" depth NEBS 
compliant "carrier servers" and servers with more network slots and my 
guess is you'll see more and more of them.  Biggest issue is cooling a 
general CPU which is beefy enough to support the throughput you may need.  
 


The vMX as a vRR works fine now, as does the XRv and vSROS ones from 
Cisco/ALU.  They are all fairly "productized" at this point.  I believe 
starting in 14.2 the vMX uses the same jinstall packages to upgrade as any 
other MX.  

Sorry for taking this off-topic. :) 

Phil 



On 11/13/14, 4:10 PM, "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:

>On Thursday, November 13, 2014 05:44:16 PM Eric Van Tol 
>wrote:
>
>>  Or am I misunderstanding the vMX?  Not trying to be
>> snarky, it's a serious question.  I am not sure where I
>> would see the vMX in a production service provider
>> network, but I am certainly open to ideas.
>
>I'd deploy vMX as a route reflector. I was actually 
>evaluating vRR a few months ago, but it still had a long way 
>to go, so went with Cisco's CSR1000v (which is, basically, 
>IOS XE) instead.
>
>We run all our route reflectors on CSR1000v, off 1U HP 
>servers. Very nice!
>
>Mark.