Metaswitch ax1000 as a RR

Sat Feb 7 19:55:58 UTC 2015

I've been testing various vRR solutions recently but haven't taken a long 
look at Metaswitch, but I may contact them.  On paper, their RR doesn't 
support all the AFI/SAFI combinations I require.  

There are a few commercial options which have come to market very recently 
namely:  

ALU VSR 
Juniper vMX (vRR version) 
Cisco XRv (IOS-XR) 
Cisco CSR1000v (IOS-XE) 

I can't give exact numbers, but all of them are much faster on pretty 
basic newish Xeon hardware than a Cisco ASR9K/Juniper MX with the latest 
and greatest RP, while using almost no CPU really.  They don't need much 
RAM either, 8-16GB is more than enough.  XRv and the CSR1000v will run 
under ESX fine, and are packaged/documented to deploy that way.  vMX/VSR 
will but it's not really a supported/documented thing yet, they are 
currently supported running under Qemu/KVM. 

One issue with VSR/xRV under ESX right now is they have no "display" 
drivers/output, so you have to use a virtual serial port which is only 
supported with the Enterprise+ version of ESX for some inane reason.  

XRv is 32-bit for now, the others are all 64-bit. 

CSR1000v has definitey been around the longest.  XRv, vMX, and VSR all get 
built the same time as the router software now so they get features when 
the router software does.  You will find more features in them than the 
CSR1000v and new service provider features will be in XR before XE.  For 
instance Cisco has something called Optimized Route Reflection where a vRR 
will simulate the IGP network rooted at each client and send the best BGP 
paths specific to each client.  It means you can have a centralized RR 
without running into the issue of it selecting paths based on its position 
in the network vs. the client.  That's a beta XRv thing but I don't know 
if you'll ever see it in XE.     

All of them support pretty much every major AFI/SAFI.  

Pricing wise the CSR1000v is going to easily be the cheapest option.  

Phil 

On 2/5/15, 20:41, "David Bass" <davidbass570 at gmail.com> wrote:

>I have a client looking to implement x86 based route reflectors, and was 
>looking at the ax1000.  I'm wondering if anyone has implemented it yet, 
>and what your experience has been?
>
>Any other alternatives would also be appreciated.  This customer does 
>standard L3 VPNs, and VPLS services so the software has to support that.  
>
>Thanks!
>
>