Hey all, have some Brocade MLXe’s that can no longer handle a full v4 and v6 route table while also having VRF support (dumb CAM profile limitations in the software). Mine don’t do anything fancy; just BGP to a few upstream peers and OSPF/OSPFv3 to the inside, management VRF, some ACL’s. I’m looking at the ASR9001 with add-on ports since I need (10) 10gig. However, I’ve also been running some Arista 7280SE’s for the past 18 months with no issues, and they want me to consider their 7280R since it would give me more ports, in addition to some higher speed ports, which would be nice if I ever want to upgrade some of our peering to 40 or 100gig.
Arista’s specs say the 7500R / 7280R can handle 1M ipv4+ipv6 routes in hardware (FIB):
In theory, it would last at least a few years if the v4 table doesn’t get too crazy between now and then.
Curious if anyone has deployed a 7500R or 7280R in this role and what the feedback has been?
The 9001’s 4M ‘credits’ for the combo of v4 +(2)v6 routes obviously goes much further, but I think either one would make it to their expected end of life, or if not on the Arista side, I’d probably have spent half as much.
I've deployed a 7280SR in that role. Needs the FLX model/license, and a
special TCAM optimization command to install all the routes in hardware.
Right now, just pulling a single v4 feed, expanding to a second soon; no v6
yet. Overall, no major issues with it, but Arista seems to be pretty
close-lipped about the secret sauce in Flexroute that lets it scale over 1M.
There isn’t really anything super special about it if you know about the memory space on the Jericho chipset and the LPM/EPM tables. Cisco is doing relatively the same things with their 5502 platform, it supports 1M FIB entries in the base memory model. Most of it banks on the fact the bulk of the table is made up of /24 prefixes, and where it doesn’t optimization techniques can be done to make them /24s.
maybe biased but most obvious for the MLXE: Replace the MLXE linecard with a BR-MLX-10GX10-X2 (can be upgraded to 20 ports later) and run multi-service-6?
Yes, we (Netflix) have the Arista 7500R and 7280R widely deployed as edge
routers. We're a few months away from shutting down the few remaining MXs
and ASRs in our CDN.
Since then, route table growth hasn't changed appreciably. Also, Arista
has added some features (notably route-map subroutine support and
default-deny) that improve BGP policy functionality.
If your use case allows you to use a default for those routes not heard via
your direct peers, there are options to increase the functional scale (and
thus to stretch the lifespan beyond ~4 years). In addition to filtering,
there's support for selective route download, which will allow you to keep
a full RIB with a more limited FIB.
Be careful here; the 9001 won't support IOS-XR 64-bit as far as anyone
can make out, and there is a semi-confirmed successor already on its way
up ("9901"). Be sure to mention this if you're speaking to Cisco.
At that sort of bandwidth, however, something that wasn't viable when I
last looked at it was Juniper's vMX. I'd be very intrigued in that as a
solution today, assuming your requirements fit into 9001-sized chunks
right now.
The 7280R might suit you though, so don't rule it out on my account. The
feature count has been coming on fast since I last evaluated it, late
last year.
I have a bunch of 7280R in a edge-peering role in as2603 network. Works really well and now with the latest additions of subroutemaps and a very optimistic road-map for features i think these style boxes will definitely see more market. Comparing the price of a 7820R 1Tb box with like a Juniper MX with 1Tb worth of ports its not even on the same play-field.
I wouldn't count on the 1M routes to last a lifetime but on the other hand its very easy to re-skill the box to something else. If we look at broadcoms road-map there is also new 7280s destined to come out quite soon with the Jericho+ chipset, broadcom promises 20-25% table-increase so we will see what arista, cisco and the others boils it down to when the chip has gotten a box wrapped around it.
Arista’s specs say the 7500R / 7280R can handle 1M ipv4+ipv6 routes in hardware (FIB):
I'm using these as edge routers facing multiple peering networks and several full table feeds. No problems so far, very cost effective platform in my mind.
Here is what it looks like with about 100 peers and several full table feeds:
