Cisco Router best for full BGP on a sub 5K bidget 7500 7200 or other vendor ?

Sun Apr 25 11:49:23 UTC 2004

Alexander Hagen wrote:
> I bought a Riverstone Rs-3000 for BGP with a single upstream provider.
> Great Deal.  

Yeah, it might be a Great Deal (tm), but you're in for some surprises. 
I've seen an RS-8600 (with CM3 and 512MB on board) nearly melt under 
13Mbps of Nachi, to the point that I had to set the CM failover 
keepalive timer to >30 seconds. We had a failover one night due to CPU 
exhaustion - I think the route reconvergence was actually worse than the 
performance of the box prior to the failover, but that's just my 
opinion. I've also seen the same unit nearly melt under 9Mbps of SQL 
Slammer - the CPU was so busy setting up flows that it was unable to 
rate limit this customer to 1Mbps or anywhere close.  On a box with a 
64Gbps backplane, I'm certainly not impressed, though I guess if I just 
used it as a switch it'd be happy.

Plus, you'll have a whole new learning curve for BGP.  Wanna use a route 
map outbound?  Expect it to reference the whole RIB, not just the BGP 
routes you've learned, redistributed, or flagged locally for 
announcement.  Wanna edit a route map?  sh run groups similar commands 
together, but sorts them in the order they were input, regardless of 
route map name and/or sequence number.  The only strong point that jumps 
out is the ability to comment - I just wrote "ALL" of the route maps I 
thought I'd need and commented the maintenance and emergency segments 
before deploying it.  And I guess cascading route maps on BGP sessions 
is a benefit, at least to overcome the CLI sorting.

pt