On Thursday, July 17, 2014 12:24:45 PM Nick Hilliard wrote:
there are other drawbacks too: the difference in convergence time between < 24k prefixes and a full dfz is usually going to be large although I haven't tested this on an me3600x yet.
Not having to install the routes into FIB (even on software- based platforms) makes a ton of difference. Our testing when using this feature on the ME3600X has shown: 1. The switch will download a full copy of the IPv6 table of 18,282 entries in 1 second. This is from 2x local route reflectors, so no latency. 2. The switch will download a full copy of the IPv4 table of 499,437 entries in 3 minutes, 10 seconds. This is from 2x local route reflectors, so no latency. The IPv4 convergence was consuming between 12% - 30% CPU utilization during the table download. This was on the IPv4 table, given its size. The IPv6 didn't bother the switch in any way. The CPU on the ME3600X is a little slow; we've seen far better IPv4 BGP table download times on meatier CPU's, and the CSR1000v, which runs on servers that kick typical router CPU's into the stone age.
Also these boxes only have 1G of memory might be a bit tight as the dfz increases. For sure, it's already not enough on a bunch of other vanilla ios platforms.
Total memory utilized (for 2x full BGPv4 and BGPv6 feeds, and after IOS deducts system memory for itself) came to 370MB. That left 424MB of memory free. Code is 15.4(2)S. Cheers, Mark.