7206 VXR NPE-G1 throughput

Tue Feb 11 23:26:24 UTC 2014

I generally spec the NPE-G1 as "up to 1Gbps" if you're using the onboard 
ports. This assumes ISP type loads with little upstream, lots of 
downstream, and relatively large flows (mostly 1500 byte packets) on 
ethernet. It sounds like this fits your usage case well. If one were to 
throw in ATM or another media type I'd drop the performance quote to 
half. If you cannot make use of CEF, or use source based routing, drop 
the performance to ~ 100Mbps. NPE-G1 with 1Gbps of RAM can take 2 full 
BGP feeds (about 700MB of memory used). Each additional feed will likely 
require another 100-200MB of memory (no soft reconfig).

NPE-G2 w/ 2GB of RAM can take several full feeds and may be able to 
operate up to 2Gbps using the onboard ports. I haven't pushed one of 
these to its limits, most people seem to move on to newer platforms first.

--Blake

Vlade Ristevski wrote the following on 2/10/2014 9:17 AM:
> We are looking to double the bandwidth on one of our circuits from 
> 300Mbps to 600Mbps. We currently use a Cisco 7206VXR with an NPE-G1 
> card. These seem like very popular routers so I'm hoping a few people 
> on this list have them deployed. If you or a customer have these 
> deployed, how much bandwidth have you seen them handle? This will be 
> handling dorm traffic at a college so it's mostly download. The 7206 
> handles our 300 Mbps circuit just fine, but we are moving it to our 
> 600Mbps circuit. At peak we've seen the following numbers for that 
> circuit:
>
>
>   30 second input rate 559982000 bits/sec, 55809 packets/sec
>   30 second output rate 55429000 bits/sec, 32598 packets/sec
>      267756984712 packets input, 333325152556755 bytes, 0 no buffer
>
> This is the interface that connects to our provider. As you can see 
> its almost all download traffic. Our ASR1002 handles it without a 
> sweat but I'm a little skeptical of whether the 7206 will hold up.
>
> Answers on and off list are appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
>