Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over? What's the "next best" box for that role? ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com
Considering it has been end of sale since December 2022 and goes end of life on 30 December 2027, I don't think that model would be a good choice right now. Robert.. On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 8:57 AM Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
What's the "next best" box for that role?
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com
_______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
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On Mon, 1 Dec 2025, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
Arista has FIB compression so depending on what your RIB looks like it might work out fine. Lots of "it depends". https://www.arista.com/en/um-eos/eos-ipv4 look for: "ip hardware fib optimize" -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 01/12/2025 13:57:18, "Mike Hammett via NANOG" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes).
They are but the R3's are more suitable being supported and higher scale (more so the 3K versions).
That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
The can have enough ram for RIB but FIB will drop some, with the Flex Route selective FIB population option it'll be at a safe for now 50% ish.
What's the "next best" box for that role?
7280SR3 or 7280SR3K, or CR's if you need all 100G ports brandon
eBay and resellers will gladly sell them after Arista stops selling them. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Webb" <rwfireguru@gmail.com> To: "North American Network Operators Group" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Sent: Monday, December 1, 2025 8:49:47 AM Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability Considering it has been end of sale since December 2022 and goes end of life on 30 December 2027, I don't think that model would be a good choice right now. Robert.. On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 8:57 AM Mike Hammett via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org > wrote: At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over? What's the "next best" box for that role? ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/TAVU4T2A...
The OS supports it, but I wonder if that command is supported on that hardware or if there are other requirements to make that a go. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mikael Abrahamsson" <swmike@swm.pp.se> To: "Mike Hammett via NANOG" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Sent: Monday, December 1, 2025 9:04:18 AM Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability On Mon, 1 Dec 2025, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
Arista has FIB compression so depending on what your RIB looks like it might work out fine. Lots of "it depends". https://www.arista.com/en/um-eos/eos-ipv4 look for: "ip hardware fib optimize" -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
I agree that's a better piece of gear. But now we're at a $20k box as opposed to a $3k box. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brandon Butterworth" <brandon@bogons.net> To: "North American Network Operators Group" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Sent: Monday, December 1, 2025 9:04:48 AM Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability On 01/12/2025 13:57:18, "Mike Hammett via NANOG" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes).
They are but the R3's are more suitable being supported and higher scale (more so the 3K versions).
That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
The can have enough ram for RIB but FIB will drop some, with the Flex Route selective FIB population option it'll be at a safe for now 50% ish.
What's the "next best" box for that role?
7280SR3 or 7280SR3K, or CR's if you need all 100G ports brandon
We have some of these switches (went for the R3K for the reasons mentioned for some, and with various port configurations) and they are nice. Can anyone speak to the need for, cost, and availability of support from Arista for switches like these sourced from eBay? We haven't needed it so far and I have been scared to reach out to them... Peter
On 12/1/25 10:53, Peter Folk via NANOG wrote:
Can anyone speak to the need for, cost, and availability of support from Arista for switches like these sourced from eBay? We haven't needed it so far and I have been scared to reach out to them...
While I haven't actually tried calling their TAC for second-hand gear, my understanding from talking to sales is that they will not provide any support for them unless you buy a support contract, and then there's a slight premium on the first contract cost to cover "re-certification of the device" or somesuch, but you can do it if the model is still within its support window in the first place. Basically, they're treated the same as any other device that has had its support/warranty period lapse. You also won't be able to log into the portal to get EOS updates, but you can solve that by just buying a single unit first-hand since EOS is the same on them all, and devices that are past sale don't generally receive many updates anyway. Note that sales can sometimes do some things on the pricing for new gear if you tell them you're considering second-hand gear due to cost sensitivity. -- Brandon Martin
On 01/12/2025 15:37:58, "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
I agree that's a better piece of gear.
But now we're at a $20k box as opposed to a $3k box.
Yes but that is the difference between suitable for some time vs being sold off as no longer up to it but could be coaxed into coping and harder to get support..
The OS supports it, but I wonder if that command is supported on that hardware or if there are other requirements to make that a go.
QR does run flexroute, that's how I was able to tell you FIB is about 50% on full table with it. You should have a license but it is not keyed and they probably won't sell one now (it'd cost more than the box too). As a gateway box to buying new models they are great value. brandon
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
1. That's a lot of ports that are gonna go unused in a network edge use case. 2. There is always some fudge from the vendor provided scale numbers. You can usually exceed them a little bit, but how much very much depends. When you exhaust the FIB memory, it's gonna stop working. Best case it crashes and reloads, worst case it wedges and needs a 1 finger salute. This box isn't designed to be an edge router. You couldn't take a full V4 and V6 table from a single provider on it without it falling over. Could you possibly make it work in some environments? Sure. But just because you can, etc, etc On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 8:57 AM Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
What's the "next best" box for that role?
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com
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https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/TAVU4T2A...
Depending on how much memory you get it with, it can do fine in that role. I've seen people on original Jericho systems at 95% utilization on the DFZ (without flexroute or fib compression) drop down to 45% utilization just by enabling the fib compression knob. The things I'd be concerned with are the default 8GB of system memory (some were sold with 32GB), and the cross-connect architecture - it's two Jericho ASICs plugged in back to back with some oversub between them, so if it's a lightly loaded box it should perform well, but at full capacity it can potentially cause traffic drops if the egress interface isn't on the same asic; there's a knob to enable a local-bias here. I'm also not aware of any avenues to get software downloads or support for grey-market equipment. As far as the licensing piece that was mentioned, there are no licensing keys for routing on Arista. Generally the only time you'll see hard license enforcement is for crypto compliance. On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 1:56 PM Tom Beecher via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price,
large
packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
1. That's a lot of ports that are gonna go unused in a network edge use case. 2. There is always some fudge from the vendor provided scale numbers. You can usually exceed them a little bit, but how much very much depends. When you exhaust the FIB memory, it's gonna stop working. Best case it crashes and reloads, worst case it wedges and needs a 1 finger salute.
This box isn't designed to be an edge router. You couldn't take a full V4 and V6 table from a single provider on it without it falling over. Could you possibly make it work in some environments? Sure. But just because you can, etc, etc
On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 8:57 AM Mike Hammett via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
What's the "next best" box for that role?
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com
_______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/TAVU4T2A...
_______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list
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On Dec 1, 2025, at 8:57 AM, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
If you let it run out of FIB space, those routes that don’t make it into the FIB blackhole. FIB compression works quite well though, especially if you enable it. :)
Is FIB compression accounted for in their "over 1M" routes claim, or is that on top of the spec? ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Lewis" <jlewis@lewis.org> To: nanog@lists.nanog.org Cc: nanog@lists.nanog.org, "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Sent: Wednesday, December 3, 2025 7:40:34 PM Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability
On Dec 1, 2025, at 8:57 AM, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
If you let it run out of FIB space, those routes that don’t make it into the FIB blackhole. FIB compression works quite well though, especially if you enable it. :)
FIB compression makes it go over the ASIC’s official limit - as far as I know the 1M+ is from the ASIC’s spec Pedro Martins Prado pedro.prado@gmail.com / +353 83 036 1875
On 4 Dec 2025, at 13:58, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Is FIB compression accounted for in their "over 1M" routes claim, or is that on top of the spec?
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com <http://www.ics-il.com/>
Midwest-IX http://www.midwest-ix.com <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Lewis" <jlewis@lewis.org <mailto:jlewis@lewis.org>> To: nanog@lists.nanog.org <mailto:nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: nanog@lists.nanog.org <mailto:nanog@lists.nanog.org>, "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net <mailto:nanog@ics-il.net>> Sent: Wednesday, December 3, 2025 7:40:34 PM Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability
On Dec 1, 2025, at 8:57 AM, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
If you let it run out of FIB space, those routes that don’t make it into the FIB blackhole. FIB compression works quite well though, especially if you enable it. :)
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Last year, during a PoC, we installed 9M IPv4 and 1M IPv6 routes into the FIB of a 7280CR3-32D4. The router continued operating even after the FIB space was exhausted. Consequently, I expect the same behavior from the Arista 7280QR-C36, given that both use the same operating system. From: Jon Lewis via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Date: Wednesday, 3 December 2025 at 22:41 To: nanog@lists.nanog.org <nanog@lists.nanog.org> Cc: nanog@lists.nanog.org <nanog@lists.nanog.org>, Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> Subject: Re: Arista 7280QR-C36 Viability
On Dec 1, 2025, at 8:57 AM, Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
At the risk of the Streisand effect, what am I missing about the Arista 7280QR-C36? It looks like a great router for small ISPs (great price, large packet buffers, good port selection, meaningful hardware routes). That said, it looks to be right on the border of DFZ viability. It supports "over 1M" routes, but I currently have about 1,036,824 in my route table. How much over is "over"? What happens in EOS when it goes over?
If you let it run out of FIB space, those routes that don’t make it into the FIB blackhole. FIB compression works quite well though, especially if you enable it. :) _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/O4TFCZWJ...
participants (11)
-
Alberto Vargas -
Brandon Butterworth -
Brandon Martin -
Jon Lewis -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Mike Hammett -
Pedro Prado -
Peter Folk -
Robert Webb -
Tom Beecher -
Tyler Conrad