Hi Adam,

The intention is not to put in the Data Plane at all but use it for control functions and calculating optimal paths, we are happy with how FRR is handling small network islands to Route traffic in Data Plane and wanted to test this as a candidate for Hierarchical Route-Reflection at site level while proven hardware will be used at a Cluster level.

for the benefit of others, FRR member replied about his observations

'''

Hi Rakesh,

We currently running one FRR route-reflector on a backbone, some peers send FV, some not. Here is header of 'show bgp summary':

IPv4 Unicast Summary:

BGP router identifier 10.10.10.100, local AS number 65009 vrf-id 0

BGP table version 143698323

RIB entries 1428204, using 218 MiB of memory

Peers 26, using 537 KiB of memory

Peer groups 9, using 576 bytes of memory

We hit problem with bgpd eating whole CPU core on 7.1, so I built FRR with appropriate patch manually. But that must been fixed in 7.2. Otherwise it runs pretty good for the last ~3 months.

'''

On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 11:04 AM <adamv0025@netconsultings.com> wrote:

> ERCIN TORUN
> Sent: Friday, November 15, 2019 9:34 AM
>
> Hello Rakesh,
>
> As James said, better to ask it at FRR mailing list.
>
> Generally chipset is what limits the scale (e.g. trident2 is 128k ipv4 lpm
> https://docs.cumulusnetworks.com/cumulus-linux/Layer-3/Routing/ ). If
> you disable "zebra" daemon, FRR works only in control-plane then you would
> most likely have a limitation with memory/RAM only. (speed is another
> issue).
>
Data-plane lookup memory limitations have nothing to do with the scale of a RR function, as you eluded to (if the RR is in path then it has to act as any other routing node so FIB scaling limitations apply -but that is completely orthogonal to the RR function).
One would assume that NOS to be used for a crucial role in the overall BGP infrastructure would feature the essential ability to limit the installation (complete/selective) of routes to FIB/data-plane. (or in the modern virtual deployments lack the data-plane altogether).

adam