[j-nsp] cheapest juniper router capable of lsys

[Vincent Bernat]

 ❦ 27 juin 2017 10:53 -0500, "Aaron Gould" <aaron1 at gvtc.com> :

> Thanks Vincent, a coworker and myself were able to fire up a few lsys's on olive/vmx
>
> The problem I have the vmx/olive on my gns3 box is that I have
> forwarding issues with layer 2 type stuff.  I used GNS3/olive/vmx for
> lots of routing/mpls l3vpn testing, but layer 2 stuff never worked for
> me.  Is there a way to get l2circuit and bridging and vpls to work and
> actually pass traffic in vmx/olive ?

You seem to assume Olive and vMX are the same thing. I believe Olive was
a hack to run JunOS using FreeBSD. You got a control plane and no real
dataplane (all data forwarding was delegated to JunOS which I suppose
was able to do IP routing, but not bridging).

On the other hand, vMX comes with a supported JunOS VM as a control
plane and one or several VM acting as data plane. Those VM translate
instructions for the Trio chipset into x86 instructions. All features
available in a real MX should be available in the vMX. I didn't try
anything fancy myself, but IRB is running without any problem.

The downside of the vMX for experimentation is that it is very CPU
hungry. The dataplane VMs are using a busy loop to catch packets and
they will use 100% of the CPU you allocate to them. They also need a lot
of memory. The same applies for all other similar products from Juniper
(vSRX, vQFX). Older versions of the vSRX are lighter, notably the
Firefly appliance (vSRX 12.something).
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