Arista Layer3

Fri Dec 1 16:33:10 UTC 2017

While I am personally a fan of mikrotik for their ridiculously inexpensive
MPLS features, their total and complete lack of ISIS is a show stopper in a
lot of cases (and makes me sad) and their v6 support is
mostly-ok-but-still-wonky(which also makes me sad) - and ROS 7 has been
"coming soon" in the same way that Apple has been "going out of business"
for 30 years.
The Arista 7500R series has a lot of promise from a service provider
perspective, but the MPLS stack is still under heavy development, but
what's actually there has been solid. What I do like about their gear is
what has typically been true of younger vendors: they listen and implement.
Like Frederik stated, their roadmap is impressively full and my experience
has been that they deliver on their roadmap since it's completely customer
driven. For complicated SPs with lots of RSVP-TE, segment routing, complex
route leaking and other multi-tenant features it may or may not be ready
yet but it's getting pretty close. Interface buffers and other SP specific
things are there based on their chipsets, which is encouraging, and on
paper their programmability is near the top of the heap, especially if
you're using something like Ansible or other access to eAPI (FWIW, we've
been testing some of the programmability on smaller Arista for a bit and
are so far no issues).

nb

ᐧ

---
Nick Buraglio
Energy Sciences Network; AS293
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
buraglio at es.net
+1 (510) 995-6068

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Frederik Kriewitz <frederik at kriewitz.eu>
wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 7:36 PM, Romeo Czumbil <
> Romeo.Czumbil at tierpoint.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > So do we have any Arista L3 people out here that can share some negatives
> or positives?
>
> We're using the Arista 7280R with Jericho(+) chips as PE routers.
> We're happy with them.
> Stable operation, no serious issues so far.
>
> Feature wise they're still behind the traditional vendors.
> Some limitations which come to mind:
> - reverse path filtering
> - prefix lists are limited to 65k entries
> - unexpected behaviour with route-map community add/delete (it's not
> possible to add a community which would be delted by a previous term)
> - VRF/MPLS/VPLS support is very basic
> - no support for unnumbered interfaces
> - no BGP flowspec
> - no BGP large communities
> - no subinterfaces
>
> On the other hand all of the above (except unnumbered interfaces) are
> already on their 2018 road map.
> Traditionally they focused on their data center customers.
> But more and more (big) carriers are pushing Arista for the corresponding
> features needed by carriers.
>