Looking for core L3 switch for campus network; feedback on Juniper EX8208?

Israel G. Lugo israel.lugo at lugosys.com
Fri Apr 17 10:40:31 UTC 2015


Hello,

I'm thinking of buying a Juniper EX8208 to serve as the core L3 switch
on an collapsed campus network (faculty, academia).

Rough figures: around 6,000 eyeballs, up to around 10,000 MACs, spread
over some 30 buildings of varying size. OM2/OM3 fiber from the buildings
to the core, using 1Gb optics. Planning to upgrade to monomode within 2
years and may migrate some buildings to 10 Gb.

>From the spec sheets, the EX8208 seems to fit the bill. It will be
teaming up with an older Alcatel L3 switch, which will work as backup.
VRRP, OSPF, MSTP. It'll be replacing another Alcatel L3 switch that
we're sending back due to way too many bugs and reliability issues over
the 1.5 year span that we had it.

We are fully IPv6 dual-stack (for over 10 years now), so this needs to
support fully working OSPFv3, VRRPv3, MLD and so on. According to the
manuals for the EX line, that seems to be the case (with some
limitations regarding OSPFv3, it seems).

Access and aggregation switches are mostly Alcatel. There are a few
other routers for VLANs with specific requirements (NAT, firewalling,
etc). All using OSPFv2 and OSPFv3.

I'd welcome any feedback regarding the EX820x, positive or negative.
Bugs, support quality, stability issues, scalability, IPv6 support...

I could go up to the EX9200 if necessary.

I've had very good experience with the SRX2x0 line in a separate
setting, and Juniper TAC in general always seemed quite good. Of course
the EX8200 is a different ballpark so things may be different. I'm
curious for example: as a switch, I'd expect the EX8200 to work in
packet mode, yes? Or does it have flowd and its security {...} section?
I wouldn't really use the flow features at this level and wouldn't like
to have it there waiting to catch a bug from some weird packets thrown
at it.

Thank you for reading. Regards,
Israel G. Lugo



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