Mailing List Archive

On 31/Oct/19 15:20, Howard Leadmon wrote:
>
>  OK, maybe I am just losing my mind, but the more I look at
> information on the ASR's the more confusing it gets, what happened to
> the good old 6500/7600 days..

Oh gosh, now you're going to set Gert off. He has been a happy camper
these past few years, even Oliver took a break :-).

>  Now here is where it gets confusing for me, and I don't want to spend
> a pile of money on a new router just to find out it was wasted and
> won't work.   I see talk of perpetual licenses, flex licenses, honor
> licenses, and the latest I found was something about macsec licenses
> per port.   I am really looking for simple, I want to configure the
> box, put it in service, and just have it work, without having to worry
> about phone home's, renewal fees and anything else that can sneak up
> and bite me.

The last time I spent any mental resources on figuring our licenses on
the ASR1000 was when the only one at the time was whether the forwarding
plane is doing 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps.

When Cisco refreshed the line, it became too costly compared to the
Juniper MX options. So what we bought in 2014 is what we still have
today (ASR1002-X, ASR1006). No major traffic running through any of
these, so the only relevant ASR platform in our network is the 920,
which is different from what you need.

What I'm trying to say is, you might want to call your SE. You'll get
good feedback from this group, but to avoid anything else sneaking up on
and biting you, talk to your SE.


>
>  I did want redundancy like we had in our old 7600's, so why I figured
> the ASR1006 might be a good fit, with hardware redundancy, and
> supporting a lot more routes, plus it seems from what I have read that
> IOS-XE is very much like IOS which I am quite used to at this time.   
> If anyone has any suggestions, or can share any experiences, so I
> don't waste good money on something useless it would sure be
> appreciated..

If I'm honest, the ASR1000 is not a platform I'd spend money on, going
forward. Especially if you are not looking to run any non-Ethernet line
cards.

Focus on the MX and ASR9000, I'd say.

Mark.
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Hi,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 06:39:32PM +0200, Mark Tinka wrote:
> On 31/Oct/19 15:20, Howard Leadmon wrote:
> > ?OK, maybe I am just losing my mind, but the more I look at
> > information on the ASR's the more confusing it gets, what happened to
> > the good old 6500/7600 days..
>
> Oh gosh, now you're going to set Gert off. He has been a happy camper
> these past few years, even Oliver took a break :-).

Hear hear :-)

Actually I'm amazed at all the newfangled gear which promises to do
everything and then fails at essentials that *my 6500s* have been doing
well from day 1...

Like, Aristas Jericho boxes that have no egress counters on SVIs.

Like, insanely small amount of ACL TCAM in Broadcom Trident:

Like, ASR9001s that have only limited support for ACLs on SVIs.


OTOH, my 6500s are really falling apart, and we're fairly busy getting
rid of them (replacing the switch layer with Arista Trident2+/3 MLAG
pairs, routing for "things without ACLs" on there as well, routing for
"things with ACLs" yet undecided)... BGP currently goes to ASR9001s,
but the lack of ports and the price insanity of ASR9901 make me look
at MX204 and Arista Jericho gear...

I really like my ASR9001s, but the Cisco BU and OS confusion does not
really make me confident that this is the company I want to trust for
the next 15+ years... (unlike the 6500s that really *really* served
us well for a loooong time).

gert

--
"If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you
feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted
it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor."
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Gert Doering - Munich, Germany gert@greenie.muc.de

On 10/31/2019 12:39 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:
> If I'm honest, the ASR1000 is not a platform I'd spend money on, going
> forward. Especially if you are not looking to run any non-Ethernet line
> cards.
>
> Focus on the MX and ASR9000, I'd say.
>
> Mark.
>

  Understood, and if my poor 7606 wasn't running out of TCAM I could
continue to run with it for years to come.   I looked at the ASR9001,
but I see all the grumblings about it being only 32bit, and the 9901 is
just way to damn expensive for my blood, that much I know.    I was
debating between the 1006/RP2 and the 9001 units, and it looked like the
1006 would be good old IOS like I am used to, not that I couldn't
adjust, and had lots of redundancy available with redundant RP's and ESP's.

 I also mentioned looking at Juniper on their list, and man did many
come back telling me that JunOS could be a nightmare with commands
changing from release to release, and that if I wasn't used to JunOS
already (which I am not) that it would drive me batty.

 I guess in short I need a unit that can handle 2-3 full BGP feeds, and
also a bunch of peers at Equinix, and on top of that I need like 6-8
10GE interfaces on the router, as I can pass off most traffic to another
access switch to all of the local hardware in the racks. Outside of that
I need some VLAN trunks and life in general is good..


---
Howard Leadmon -
PBW Communications, LLC
http://www.pbwcomm.com


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On 10/31/2019 2:04 PM, Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Actually I'm amazed at all the newfangled gear which promises to do
> everything and then fails at essentials that *my 6500s* have been doing
> well from day 1...
?I have really loved my? 65xx's and 7600's that I have had, and my 7606
is running to this very day, passing many bits very happily.
> OTOH, my 6500s are really falling apart, and we're fairly busy getting
> rid of them (replacing the switch layer with Arista Trident2+/3 MLAG
> pairs, routing for "things without ACLs" on there as well, routing for
> "things with ACLs" yet undecided)... BGP currently goes to ASR9001s,
> but the lack of ports and the price insanity of ASR9901 make me look
> at MX204 and Arista Jericho gear...

?I had a few tell me to look at the 9901, but agree it's far to rich
for my blood, we are just small fry's running in a handful of racks, so
I have a hard time justifying a 100K? for a router.?? So do you feel
that the ASR9001 would be a good choice for the next 5 years or so, and
if I am correct on the 9001 I think the licensing is all there from the
start, so it should just play??? I think the only thing that made me
blink at the unit, is I only saw dual power supplies, granted it's a
rare day you see the processors drop over.
> I really like my ASR9001s, but the Cisco BU and OS confusion does not
> really make me confident that this is the company I want to trust for
> the next 15+ years... (unlike the 6500s that really *really* served
> us well for a loooong time).

?As I mentioned in my prior message to Mark, I even brought up the
option of a Juniper, the MX240's seem to be reasonable, but a great many
on the Juniper list no less warned me to be cautious and said if I
wanted to consider JunOS I best have a unit to lab with for a while
first.?? That and list with so many other vendors, the licensing looked
every bit as much of a pain in the backside.?? So after all that I went
back to looking at the ASR1006 and ASR9001 for my task.??? As I also
mentioned in my prior message back to the list, I really just need a
good BGP speaker with capacity for a few million IPv4/IPv6 routes, so I
am not fork-lifting it out in a years time.? I also need say 8 10GE
ports to connect to my upstreams, peers, and the rest of my internal
network..

>
> gert
>

---
Howard Leadmon
PBW Communications, LLC
http://www.pbwcomm.com


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On 31/Oct/19 21:13, Howard Leadmon wrote:

>  
>
>  I also mentioned looking at Juniper on their list, and man did many
> come back telling me that JunOS could be a nightmare with commands
> changing from release to release, and that if I wasn't used to JunOS
> already (which I am not) that it would drive me batty.

I wouldn't let the opinions of others dent your hopes. I mean, there is
a reason j-nsp is a busy list, and that Juniper are selling gear.

Junos is just different from IOS, not impossible.

Mark.
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Hi,

> I also mentioned looking at Juniper on their list, and man did many come back telling me that JunOS could be a nightmare with commands changing from release to release, and that if I wasn't used to JunOS already (which I am not) that it would drive me batty.

For me it is very much the opposite. I love the structure and possibilities for automation in JunOS, and I silently cry when I have to automate anything on old style iOS…

If you have a VMware ESXi box available just download the vMX eval from the Juniper website and you can decide for yourself.

Cheers,
Sander

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Hi,

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 03:23:56PM -0400, Howard Leadmon wrote:
> So do you feel
> that the ASR9001 would be a good choice for the next 5 years or so, and
> if I am correct on the 9001 I think the licensing is all there from the
> start, so it should just play?

Yes. There are extra licenses for L3 VPN (and insanely expensive), but
basic IPv4/IPv6/MPLS is all in the basic IOS XR you buy with it.

For a BGP edge router with "12x 10GE interfaces are sufficient for the
foreseeable future" it's a very nice box. Very fast and very good BGP
implementation, very robust altogether.

There are caveats

- upgrading IOS XR is very time consuming, so do not make this your
single link to the world

- the configuration is sufficiently different from IOS (especially the
BGP policy language) that it will take a few days to get yourself
sorted out. There are good intro pages into XR on the web, though.

I think I've learned quite a lot from this blog: https://fryguy.net/
(now combined into https://fryguy.net/2012/10/19/ios-xr-workbook/)

- single RSP - we've never had one fail on us, but of course, RAM can
go bad, flash can go bad, etc. - so "do not make this your single
link to the world"

- dual PSUs, though :-)

- it will not do everything an ASR1k can do - for example, no L2TP
termination, limited support for ACLs on SVIs, no IPSEC tunnels,
maybe more. So verify closely what features you need.

gert
--
"If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you
feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted
it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor."
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Gert Doering - Munich, Germany gert@greenie.muc.de

On 1/Nov/19 10:49, Gert Doering wrote:

>
> Yes. There are extra licenses for L3 VPN (and insanely expensive), but
> basic IPv4/IPv6/MPLS is all in the basic IOS XR you buy with it.
>
> For a BGP edge router with "12x 10GE interfaces are sufficient for the
> foreseeable future" it's a very nice box. Very fast and very good BGP
> implementation, very robust altogether.

The last few we had for peering were replaced with an MX480 or MX204.

Now we have them running for routing to our CDN partners.

A bit old and slow, but not as bad as the MX80's (which we've since
dropped entirely). So perhaps 2 - 3 more years in them before we have to
replace them, I'd reckon.

Mark.

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 at 21:13, Howard Leadmon <howard@leadmon.net> wrote:

> I also mentioned looking at Juniper on their list, and man did many
> come back telling me that JunOS could be a nightmare with commands
> changing from release to release, and that if I wasn't used to JunOS
> already (which I am not) that it would drive me batty.

This sounds like hogwash, you can have any type of narrative
for/against any vendor. If there was massive OPEX or CAPEX difference,
market would select underperformers out. You can certainly pick up any
Juniper, Huawei, Nokia, Cisco and keep running your business.
World is just full of engineers who've not done any other work but
Cisco CLI jockey without understanding what they are doing there, just
memorising commands and punching them in. For them, anything else is
hard. For anyone who has some idea what they are doing, every vendor
is easy to configure.


--
++ytti
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On 10/31/19 12:23 PM, Howard Leadmon wrote:
> On 10/31/2019 2:04 PM, Gert Doering wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Actually I'm amazed at all the newfangled gear which promises to do
>> everything and then fails at essentials that *my 6500s* have been doing
>> well from day 1...
> ?I have really loved my? 65xx's and 7600's that I have had, and my
> 7606 is running to this very day, passing many bits very happily.
>> OTOH, my 6500s are really falling apart, and we're fairly busy getting
>> rid of them (replacing the switch layer with Arista Trident2+/3 MLAG
>> pairs, routing for "things without ACLs" on there as well, routing for
>> "things with ACLs" yet undecided)...?? BGP currently goes to ASR9001s,
>> but the lack of ports and the price insanity of ASR9901 make me look
>> at MX204 and Arista Jericho gear...
>
> ?I had a few tell me to look at the 9901, but agree it's far to rich
> for my blood, we are just small fry's running in a handful of racks,
> so I have a hard time justifying a 100K? for a router.?? So do you
> feel that the ASR9001 would be a good choice for the next 5 years or
> so, and if I am correct on the 9001 I think the licensing is all there
> from the start, so it should just play??? I think the only thing that
> made me blink at the unit, is I only saw dual power supplies, granted
> it's a rare day you see the processors drop over.
>> I really like my ASR9001s, but the Cisco BU and OS confusion does not
>> really make me confident that this is the company I want to trust for
>> the next 15+ years... (unlike the 6500s that really *really* served
>> us well for a loooong time).
>
> ?As I mentioned in my prior message to Mark, I even brought up the
> option of a Juniper, the MX240's seem to be reasonable, but a great
> many on the Juniper list no less warned me to be cautious and said if
> I wanted to consider JunOS I best have a unit to lab with for a while
> first.?? That and list with so many other vendors, the licensing
> looked every bit as much of a pain in the backside.?? So after all
> that I went back to looking at the ASR1006 and ASR9001 for my task.???
> As I also mentioned in my prior message back to the list, I really
> just need a good BGP speaker with capacity for a few million IPv4/IPv6
> routes, so I am not fork-lifting it out in a years time.? I also need
> say 8 10GE ports to connect to my upstreams, peers, and the rest of my
> internal network..
>
I want to chime in on this -


I have always been cisco shop. One day, I really had had enough with the
oppressive pricing of 10G ports so after a lot of looking around, I
wound up going with a juniper mx240, dual 1800-4 route engines and 16
10G ports for $25k. I was able to go from zero juniper-foo to a fully
configured bgp peering / ospf igp setup in roughly a week, and since
then, have been able to make granular configuration improvements that
just keep getting better over time. I quickly discovered the fact of the
configuration not being committed until I 'commit' and being able to
automatically roll-back if I make a bad mistake, and a whole host of
other awesome features as documented in juniper day one documents. I
have become totally sold on the platform and just shudder to think of
how much productivity I have lost fighting various ciscoisms that just
dont seem to exist here. Not to soapbox too much, but don't listen to
nay sayers. I was able to make the leap pretty easy and I think you
could too.


Mike-

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On 1/Nov/19 22:54, Mike wrote:

>  
> I want to chime in on this -
>
>
> I have always been cisco shop. One day, I really had had enough with
> the oppressive pricing of 10G ports so after a lot of looking around,
> I wound up going with a juniper mx240, dual 1800-4 route engines and
> 16 10G ports for $25k. I was able to go from zero juniper-foo to a
> fully configured bgp peering / ospf igp setup in roughly a week, and
> since then, have been able to make granular configuration improvements
> that just keep getting better over time. I quickly discovered the fact
> of the configuration not being committed until I 'commit' and being
> able to automatically roll-back if I make a bad mistake, and a whole
> host of other awesome features as documented in juniper day one
> documents. I have become totally sold on the platform and just shudder
> to think of how much productivity I have lost fighting various
> ciscoisms that just dont seem to exist here. Not to soapbox too much,
> but don't listen to nay sayers. I was able to make the leap pretty
> easy and I think you could too.

This.

And the point isn't that Cisco are better than Juniper, or Juniper
better than Arista, or Arista better than Nokia, or Nokia better than
Huawei.

The point is that take the leap and discover your own truth.

Mark.
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Hi,

This is just my opinion RE: Juniper vs going from IOS to IOS XR but the change in OS "structure" between going from IOS (6500/7600) to going to JunOS OR IOS XR is... about the same.

Also I like my ASR9001s much more than my MX80. For what it's worth.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp <cisco-nsp-bounces@puck.nether.net> On Behalf Of Howard Leadmon
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2019 3:24 PM
To: Gert Doering <gert@greenie.muc.de>; cisco-nsp@puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Cisco ASR1000 Info..

On 10/31/2019 2:04 PM, Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Actually I'm amazed at all the newfangled gear which promises to do
> everything and then fails at essentials that *my 6500s* have been
> doing well from day 1...
?I have really loved my? 65xx's and 7600's that I have had, and my 7606 is running to this very day, passing many bits very happily.
> OTOH, my 6500s are really falling apart, and we're fairly busy getting
> rid of them (replacing the switch layer with Arista Trident2+/3 MLAG
> pairs, routing for "things without ACLs" on there as well, routing for
> "things with ACLs" yet undecided)... BGP currently goes to ASR9001s,
> but the lack of ports and the price insanity of ASR9901 make me look
> at MX204 and Arista Jericho gear...

?I had a few tell me to look at the 9901, but agree it's far to rich for my blood, we are just small fry's running in a handful of racks, so I have a hard time justifying a 100K? for a router.?? So do you feel that the ASR9001 would be a good choice for the next 5 years or so, and if I am correct on the 9001 I think the licensing is all there from the start, so it should just play??? I think the only thing that made me blink at the unit, is I only saw dual power supplies, granted it's a rare day you see the processors drop over.
> I really like my ASR9001s, but the Cisco BU and OS confusion does not
> really make me confident that this is the company I want to trust for
> the next 15+ years... (unlike the 6500s that really *really* served us
> well for a loooong time).

?As I mentioned in my prior message to Mark, I even brought up the option of a Juniper, the MX240's seem to be reasonable, but a great many on the Juniper list no less warned me to be cautious and said if I wanted to consider JunOS I best have a unit to lab with for a while first.?? That and list with so many other vendors, the licensing looked every bit as much of a pain in the backside.?? So after all that I went back to looking at the ASR1006 and ASR9001 for my task.??? As I also mentioned in my prior message back to the list, I really just need a good BGP speaker with capacity for a few million IPv4/IPv6 routes, so I am not fork-lifting it out in a years time.? I also need say 8 10GE ports to connect to my upstreams, peers, and the rest of my internal network..

>
> gert
>

---
Howard Leadmon
PBW Communications, LLC
http://www.pbwcomm.com


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