I know ExtremeNetwork's high position in L2, but don't have any idea how they perform on L3. Now an Alpine3804 might the right solution for a customer as he needs a loadbalancer, switch and router which also should do BGP. Any experience and hints welcome! Arnold
On Thu, 31 May 2001, Arnold Nipper wrote:
I know ExtremeNetwork's high position in L2, but don't have any idea how they perform on L3. Now an Alpine3804 might the right solution for a customer as he needs a loadbalancer, switch and router which also should do BGP.
Any experience and hints welcome!
Personally, I'm a purist. I say use something like an Alteon AD3 or ACESwitch 180e for a loadbalancer, $favorite_vendor_kit for router, and the alpine for a switch. -j -- -Jonathan Disher -Sr. Systems and Network Engineer, Web Operations -Internet Pictures Corporation, Palo Alto, CA -[v] (650) 388-0497 | [p] (877) 446-9311 | [e] jdisher@eng.ipix.com
My experiences with Extreme equipment at both L2 and L3 has been extremely pleasing. We done Black Diamonds talking BGP to Junipers and found no problems save for lack of ATM legacy support on the Extreme gear (I'd love to cleanly map PVCs into an 802.1q VLAN). We've not done BGP from the Alpines, as we use them primarily for 10/100 to Gig aggregation to BDs at the core, but its the same software on both platforms so I don't imagine any problems would crop up specific to the Alpines. As for the load balancing aspect, we've been less giddy. It's functional, especially if you are balancing basic HTML/SSL type traffic, but tends to break down when you try to get more creative (such as DNS caching servers, for example). If your client needs basic TCP load balancing for http, smtp, etc (which will suffice for many people), you should still get excellent results from the 380x line. On Thu, 31 May 2001, Arnold Nipper wrote:
I know ExtremeNetwork's high position in L2, but don't have any idea how they perform on L3. Now an Alpine3804 might the right solution for a customer as he needs a loadbalancer, switch and router which also should do BGP.
Any experience and hints welcome!
Arnold
I have had very good experiences using Extremes BGP implementation on The SummitI and Black Diamond L3 switches. I ran EBGP and IBGP (no sync) with full internet routing tables, interoperating with Cisco and Riverstone equipment and had no major problems. Extremes BGP implementation is identical to Cisco's in most respects. It provides good support for BGP reflection and uses the same route selection criteria. My only complaint is Extremes implementation Cisco's "Administrative Distance", known as "Route Priority" there is little documentation (both inside and outside of Extreme) on how the values are determined and how they can be adjusted. \michael --- Arnold Nipper <arnold@nipper.de> wrote:
I know ExtremeNetwork's high position in L2, but don't have any idea how they perform on L3. Now an Alpine3804 might the right solution for a customer as he needs a loadbalancer, switch and router which also should do BGP.
Any experience and hints welcome!
Arnold
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participants (4)
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Arnold Nipper -
Jonathan Disher -
Michael Martin -
Robert A. Hayden