How does Huawei's Versatile Routing Platform (VRP) operating system that is
on their switches and routers compare to Cisco IOS or Juniper JunOS? Is the
CLI syntax similar? How is the overall feature set? Would a tech that knows
cisco be able to understand Huawei fairly easy?
The pricing and feature set for Huawei's products are impressive, but no
one ever seems to talk about their products? They claim to have multiple
routers that smoke Cisco and Juniper platforms.We are talking Tbps
platforms. What are the overall thoughts on Huawei?
It works fine
The cli syntax is quite similar to iOS in shape, but keywords are different
You won't (almost) understand everything on the fly, reading to
documentation in *not* an option (is it somewhere ?); By the way,
Huawei's documentation is a bit ugly, not as versatile as Cisco's; You
will have troubles to understand some features if you are "new" with
these (eg protocols, techs etc). If you master these, I guess the docs
will be more understable for you.
I did not used them for routing but switching, they are really
performing good
If you plan to buy such product, keep in mind these points:
- don't mix Huawei & cisco (or anything else), you might have trouble
(as you'll get with any other constuctor mix)
- low cost switches seems to be less awesome that high-end products; You
may get more "not working" unit;
How does Huawei's Versatile Routing Platform (VRP) operating system that is
on their switches and routers compare to Cisco IOS or Juniper JunOS? Is the
CLI syntax similar? How is the overall feature set? Would a tech that knows
cisco be able to understand Huawei fairly easy?
If they know IOS they just need to change the nouns to some synonym and it's
the same.
And generally, if you know what you're doing, it's perfectly workable CLI. By
far nothing to write home to, but generally relying to CLI means there are
large inefficiencies in your process to address.
Overall the design is quite like IOS XE today, linux where single flat process
'vrp' does all the heavy-lifting.
The pricing and feature set for Huawei's products are impressive, but no
one ever seems to talk about their products? They claim to have multiple
routers that smoke Cisco and Juniper platforms.We are talking Tbps
platforms. What are the overall thoughts on Huawei?
I recently opened Huawei AR router which is essentially competing with Cisco
ISR and to lesser degree with Juniper SRX. To my surprise it was all wastern
quality kit, emmerson PSU, marvell ethernet chip, cavium octeon NPU/CPU, so
pretty similar to SRX in HW terms.
CX competes with ASR9k/MX, and NE as far as I know is like CX but more
core-focused marketing (like JNPR T is like MX for people with too much money)
I personally wouldn't have trouble committing heavily on Huawei kit if
economics otherwise make sense (training, systems, etc)
Hi Colton,
I've been recently looking at the Huawei 12808 switch - I'm not sure if it's the same OS as the routers, but so far I've had a positive experience.
I would say it's not very close at all to IOS - other than being command line - perhaps closer than Extreme's OS, but not by much.
That being said, the '?' and tab keys are helpful, and if you understand the concepts, you can usually find the right knobs to turn. In addition, at least for me, the Huawei teams have been extraordinarily helpful in providing configuration templates and support.
I think someone commented that it doesn't mix well with Cisco - I would throw in that that's probably only based on the fact that Huawei does not support PVST.