So I've been using Arista as layer2 for quite some time, and I'm pretty happy with them.
Kicking the idea around to turn on some Layer3 features but I've been hearing some negative feedback.
The people that I did hear negative feedback don't use Arista themselves. (they just heard....)
So do we have any Arista L3 people out here that can share some negatives or positives?
Use case: Just some MPLS IPv4/IPv6 routing, l2vpn OSPF/BGP
Maybe 20k routes (no full internet routes)
7050 Series
7280 Series
For Enterprise/DC, it works great. For service provider, they're not 100%
yet. The main issue is going to be around VRFs, as there's no interaction
between them (at least in the code version I'm on, that may have changed
recently or be changing soon). They'll work great as a P-Router, but if you
need a PE with route leaking I'd look at another vendor.
I use a couple pairs of 7280SRs as edge routers/border leaves. Multiple
full table feeds without any issue.
Back to this discussion! Arista as a viable full-table PE router. Was hoping
for better experience reports since last mention.
To make the Q bit more general, are there any PE routers yet that can handle 3-8
full feeds and use an amp and 1U or so instead of 5 and 4U? Or we're ito whitebox/
open routers still for that (bird/openbgp?) or microtiks?
I have a whole bunch of 7280SR in production, acting as peering-aggregators to easy be able to scale out PNIs to the CDN/Clouds (where you sometimes needs to add 10G of capacity per PoP per month)
They work just fine. Simple PE-functions, a few hundred BGP-peers in each, full tables, as-path filtering (150k lines of config), route-maps and sub-route maps. It is certainly not as flexible and easy to work with as for example a MX-router. But on the other hand you get 1Tbit worth of ports for the same price as a 16x10G MX-card.
L3VPN, RSVP-TE which could be major things you need is coming to EOS "soon", february i think.
The boxes that is coming out here in Q1 (some even out) with Jericho+ and Jericho2 chipsets should be even better with even more tables that should suffice for quite some time, the 1mil limit on 7280SR can be borderline especially when you mix in L3VPN whenever thats coming.
Huawei (ce6870) and Cisco (ncs5500) is also selling the same boxes and rumours on the streets are that Juniper will also release a jericho-based PE-box.
Also Juniper has picked up alot of slack recently with the release of MX204, which seems for whats its worth be a really good contender in the "small but modern router" market which has been grossly overlooked by many vendors for quite some time.
Not sure where cisco really is with the 9901, which atleast looked really good on the CLUS presentations.
Thx. Rather steer clear of microtik for now however.
Guess I shoulda mentioned a baseline 10G capability at least on 4 sfp+ ports
(I know there's some 2port Microtiks too). Everyone's got gig-to-the-home now,
I can't see how anyone plans 1G PE builds anymore. They'll be obsolete by the
time they're plugged in (10G for any medium sized op is almost obsolete already.)
Back to this discussion! Arista as a viable full-table PE router. Was hoping
for better experience reports since last mention.
To make the Q bit more general, are there any PE routers yet that can handle 3-8
full feeds and use an amp and 1U or so instead of 5 and 4U? Or we're ito whitebox/
open routers still for that (bird/openbgp?) or microtiks?
Arista DCS-7280SRA-48C6 is a 1ru box.
Has a nominally million route fib, Jericho+ 8GB of packet buffer.
control-plane is 8GB of ram andAMD GX-424CC SOC which is 4 core 2.4ghz.
We do direct fib injection with bird rather than the arista bgpd but the
control-plane is capable of managing quite a few bgp sessions.
the 1/2ru 7280CR2K-30 and 60 are 2m route fib boxes with still heftier
control planes but they're a different class of box being all 100G and
requiring multi-chip/internal fabrics.
>
>Has a nominally million route fib, Jericho+ 8GB of packet buffer.
>control-plane is 8GB of ram andAMD GX-424CC SOC which is 4 core 2.4ghz.
>We do direct fib injection with bird rather than the arista bgpd but the
>control-plane is capable of managing quite a few bgp sessions.
>
>the 1/2ru 7280CR2K-30 and 60 are 2m route fib boxes with still heftier
>control planes but they're a different class of box being all 100G and
>requiring multi-chip/internal fabrics.
Sounds pretty good - hows your power draw on that thing? Why'd you pick Bird
in this case?
Between the two of these feature deficits, ipv6 isn't a runner on this
platform in a SP environment. Both problems are due to be resolved in
routeros v7, but the release date for this is elusive.
Also, the bgp stack is single-threaded and the individual core speeds
are relatively low, so operating these devices in the ipv4 dfz can be
troublesome.
Sounds pretty good - hows your power draw on that thing? Why'd you pick Bird
in this case?
this is a 7280SR pushing ~130G-140G of traffic in/out with about 75% of
the ports lit:
Router#show env power
Power Input Output Output
Supply Model Capacity Current Current Power Status
------- -------------------- --------- -------- -------- -------- -------------
1 PWR-500AC-F 500W 0.37A 5.89A 70.6W Ok
2 PWR-500AC-F 500W 0.39A 6.30A 75.6W Ok
Total -- 1000W -- -- 146.2W --
Router#
Also:
To make the Q bit more general, are there any PE routers yet that can handle 3-8
full feeds and use an amp and 1U or so instead of 5 and 4U?
juniper claims that the mx204 has a typical power draw of ~250W.
this a standard sr that's moderately busy but not exactly slammed, I'm
be impressed if you could triple that at full tilt.
#show environment power
Power Input Output Output
Supply Model Capacity Current Current Power Status
------- -------------------- --------- -------- -------- --------
Which Arista box do you use for FTTH features? Whats the cost like as FTTH
boxes are usually inexpensive, and Arista is not know to be inexpensive
compared to something like Calix or Adtran.
I use the DCS-7050S-52-F. This is because I get good routed features to meet my use-case, and the cost per SFP port was right. I’m purchasing them used, so my price per 1G port (that can also do 10G to uplink/infrastructure) is comparable to the per-port price of other BCM based SFP switches, and the software quality is much much higher. I don’t need 10’s of these either, so my use case is perhaps unique.
I really need some basic routing support, DHCP relay w/ circuit id, etc.
Ping me offline if you want more details about my use-case. Once I have a few more things sorted, expect a full nanog talk about my problem & solution.
We're using the Arista 7280R with Jericho(+) chips as PE routers.
We're happy with them.
Stable operation, no serious issues so far.
Feature wise they're still behind the traditional vendors.
Some limitations which come to mind:
- reverse path filtering
- prefix lists are limited to 65k entries
- unexpected behaviour with route-map community add/delete (it's not
possible to add a community which would be delted by a previous term)
- VRF/MPLS/VPLS support is very basic
- no support for unnumbered interfaces
- no BGP flowspec
- no BGP large communities
- no subinterfaces
On the other hand all of the above (except unnumbered interfaces) are
already on their 2018 road map.
Traditionally they focused on their data center customers.
But more and more (big) carriers are pushing Arista for the corresponding
features needed by carriers.
While I am personally a fan of mikrotik for their ridiculously inexpensive
MPLS features, their total and complete lack of ISIS is a show stopper in a
lot of cases (and makes me sad) and their v6 support is
mostly-ok-but-still-wonky(which also makes me sad) - and ROS 7 has been
"coming soon" in the same way that Apple has been "going out of business"
for 30 years.
The Arista 7500R series has a lot of promise from a service provider
perspective, but the MPLS stack is still under heavy development, but
what's actually there has been solid. What I do like about their gear is
what has typically been true of younger vendors: they listen and implement.
Like Frederik stated, their roadmap is impressively full and my experience
has been that they deliver on their roadmap since it's completely customer
driven. For complicated SPs with lots of RSVP-TE, segment routing, complex
route leaking and other multi-tenant features it may or may not be ready
yet but it's getting pretty close. Interface buffers and other SP specific
things are there based on their chipsets, which is encouraging, and on
paper their programmability is near the top of the heap, especially if
you're using something like Ansible or other access to eAPI (FWIW, we've
been testing some of the programmability on smaller Arista for a bit and
are so far no issues).
Hello,
What do you think about Arista 7280SR (DCS-7280SR-48C6-M-R) as a BGP peering router with 3 x upstream with full route view in RIB (ipv4 + ipv6) and another IXP feed?
Considering switching from ASR9001 which is doing perfect work but has no more ports left.
The price is very competitive comparing to MX or ASR and this router-switch have 48x10Gig + 6x100GigE ports.
Will it run smoothly with BGP, PIM, IPV6?
Thanks.
What do you think about Arista 7280SR (DCS-7280SR-48C6-M-R) as a BGP peering router with 3 x upstream with full route view in RIB (ipv4 + ipv6) and another IXP feed?
Considering switching from ASR9001 which is doing perfect work but has no more ports left.
The price is very competitive comparing to MX or ASR and this router-switch have 48x10Gig + 6x100GigE ports.
You should compare 7280SR against NCS5500 and PTX1k, not ASR and MX.
ANET is great company, with great people, but they are like 2 years
old in SP market and this is quite visible. It is impressive though
what they've done in so little time.
Arista as a viable full-table PE router. Was hoping
Arista as a viable full-table PE router. Was hoping