Mailing List Archive

I have done quite a bit of work on the vRouter 5600 v5.0R2

Ping me offline for details, but I've managed to do:

- 8 x Routers (4 x vRouters, 2 x vMX, 2 x vSRX) in an MPLS P/PE Network (doing interop with the usual suspects)
- OSPFv2 / OSPF-TE TED Database Population
- RSVP-TE and EROs
- LDP Transport LSPs
- iBGP/eBGP with a handful of routes (didn't connect it to The Internets yet... next step...)
- Route Maps / Routing Policy (i.e. matching routes, chaining localpref, overwriting next-hops for HA eBGP connections)
- VRRP for server-facing stuff
- DHCP Relay and BNG "lite" functionality
- Bridge domains, S/C tag pop-pop/push-push operations
- S/C Tag pbit re-writing
- Source / P-NAT
- 10G DPDK Acceleration (yep, this works very well)

Couple of hiccups, but nothing I haven't been able to work around so far. ( Suspect 5.xR3 or 5.1 will likely fix the corner-case behaviours.) Have some PR/reports back into Brocade; but the vast majority "just works" and works consistently. 5.x Documentation has also been vastly improved too.

- CK.




On 10 Sep 2016, at 3:32 am, Alex Valo <alex.valo@outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I am just wondering if anybody here is using Brocade vRouter 5600 in production with success? We have a project with a very small budget. The first phase will be about 200 Mbps (6 months), then 500 Mbps (6 to 12 months) and finally 3 Gbps (12 months and beyond).
>
> Our design:
>
> - 2 routers with iBGP/OSPF between them
> - 4 eBGP sessions with 1 Gbps from upstreams with full view
> - 2 eBGP sessions with 1 Gbps downstream with full view
> - a few static route subnets
> - filtering using regular route maps and traffic engineering using BGP communities
> - syslog of all event
> - sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX on the upstreams interfaces
>
> Looking for some feedbacks:
>
> Anybody keen to share their experience on either or both of these platforms?
> Anything to be specifically aware of?
> Which hardware do you use?
> What are you traffic level?
> Did it work? Is it bullet-proof?
>
> We are currently considering both Brocade vRouter and Juniper vMX.
>

Couple of things I will also mention:

- vRouter boots up a *LOT* faster than vMX/vSRX
....So the time from spin-up to forwarding packets is the quickest I've seen vs other VNFs (i.e. CSR vASR1000, vMX etc.)

- vMX doesn't do a lot of the MPC/DPC "service blade" (MS-MPC) functionality
basically non-feature parity w/vRouter w/things like IPSEC, EoGRE, NAT etc. You'd have to use vSRX for those; and the caveats/lack of features it brings. (i.e. no EoGRE, stateful flows, etc.)

- I've always had issues with vlan and pop/swap operations on vMX
(which actually i think is more of a vSwitch problem than anything when under ESXi).
KVM seems Ok tho.

- VxLAN is broken still under 15.1F5 under vMX.
The IP addressing is little-endian when it hits there wire.
i.e. IP address 1.0.0.2 of a VTEP goes "out on the wire" as source IP "2.0.0.1".
Fun eh? Took me days to find that one ( a PCAP revealed all.)

I do Like vMX a lot (what I'm used to), but the more I play with vRouter, the more I'm impressed by it.

- CK.


On 10 Sep 2016, at 3:32 am, Alex Valo <alex.valo@outlook.com> wrote:

>
> Anybody keen to share their experience on either or both of these platforms?
> Anything to be specifically aware of?
> Which hardware do you use?
> What are you traffic level?
> Did it work? Is it bullet-proof?
>
> We are currently considering both Brocade vRouter and Juniper vMX.