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BGP - Router or L3 switch
So I'm looking for a good Router or L3 switch to handle BGP, on a good price point. Able to do v6 and be able to accept a few thousand routes if needed.
I typically deal in the CRS3 routers and things of that size so I have very little knowledge on the lower end of the spectrum of what can do what.
Something that can handle 2-8 gigabit uplinks is what I'm looking for. Juniper/Cisco/Foundry
Anyone have experience with some of those soft routers you just install on a dedicated server?
Comments
I use a old box in Los Angeles running Vyatta, supermicro dual 1gbit nic and a Intel 4 port 1gbit nic
model name : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 1210
While I do not take full routes with this router, it will handle a few views just fine, in Charlotte I have a Cisco 3845, the Vyatta will handle more pps than the lower end Cisco's
I was reading that Vyatta is able to handle 8Gbps per CPU core (up to 32Gbps with a quad core CPU). While I think this is only for their vPlane appliance, I'm sure their community version can be tuned to at least 2-4Gbps with the right NIC and CPU.
They report being able to push 500k pps on their Core2Duo based appliances but I'm not able to figure out how that'd be possible. It's possible they don't use E1000 based NIC's but something entirely different.
Intel has shown that with a nice 10Gbit line card and a decent CPU (XEON 55xx or E3) you can route 10Gbit of 1500 byte packets and something like 1 - 2M pps before your
CPU is simply capped out.
'per core' doesn't really matter since linux's networking stack isn't multi threaded, meaning everything is dumped on the first core. Sure, you can SMP Affinity your NIC's to other cores, that doesn't stop the fact that at some point that core is going to be maxed.
The big hurdle is likely also iptables. You could probably make it so iptables isn't even loaded on a vyatta box or just use a bridged interface but there are many times that you want iptables there to help with some basic floods.
Francisco
@Francisco I don't really understand their vPlane appliance (didn't look into it much) but to my understanding is it's virtual router so I'm not sure how it works compared to the standard Vyatta software. Also, I was incorrect in my previous post, it was 8m PPS, not 8Gbps.
http://www.vyatta.com/technology/vplane
Yeah I actually went and revisited http://www.mikrotik.com I've used their OS for a few years when I had FIOS in Dallas, and toyed with it in lab settings. Even their high end router board appliance is good for a few gig with fire walling.