The MX204 seems to be amazing value for money if it has the right port combination for your workload (i.e. not great if you need lots of 1GE). The RE is also significantly more capable than the somewhat underpowered one in the MX104.
I would be extremely hesitant about deploying a new MX104 today given the poor CPU and relatively small amount of RAM on the RE. The RE CPU is also a PowerPC, which seems to be a bit of a dead end for Junos with new development work seemingly focussing on x86 (last time I looked, the MX104 is stuck on FreeBSD 6 and so has no SMP support despite having a dual core CPU for example). We ended up going with the Cisco ASR 9001 instead of MX104 due to the poor performance when converging multiple full BGP tables thanks to the underpowered RE CPU and interesting design choices in rpd. We’re very happy with our ASR 9001 (although IOS XR isn’t as nice to use as Junos), but if the MX204 had been available at the time, then we would quite likely have ended up using them instead. There is an ASR 9901 “coming soon”, which might also be worth a look at for new deployments. For our use case (border router terminating peering/transit), having dual RE isn’t particularly important as we achieve our redundancy using separate routers. YMMV. Edward Dore Freethought Internet From: Josh Baird <[email protected]> Date: Friday, 5 January 2018 at 14:42 To: Edward Dore <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, Juniper List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [j-nsp] Understanding limitations of various MX104 bundles I believe this is what we are finding as well, which is unfortunate. Maybe we should look at the MX204 instead? Although, it's 2X the cost (MSRP) and only has one RE. Thoughts? On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 9:18 AM, Edward Dore <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Beware the bundle upgrades on the MX104 – when we looked at these in 2016, for some reason that our VAR couldn’t explain it was cheaper to just throw the MX104-MX5-AC away and buy a brand new MX104-40G-AC-BNDL bundle rather than purchasing the MX104-MX5-40G-UPG license. Edward Dore Freethought Internet From: Josh Baird <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Friday, 5 January 2018 at 14:08 To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: Edward Dore <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Juniper List <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [j-nsp] Understanding limitations of various MX104 bundles Actually - come to find out (from my reseller), the MX104-MX5 package gives you two MIC slots. Not sure if the "locking" is actually enforced or not on the other two. Supposedly, the overall throughput of the chassis is also limited to 20Gbps - again, not sure if this is enforced. Options for 10Gbps include purchasing a single MIC-3D-2XGE-XFP and installing it in the one open MIC slot providing two 10Gbps interfaces or purchasing MX104-MX40-40G-UPG to open two of the four built-in interfaces while also bumping overall capacity of the chassis to 40Gbps. The S-MX104-UPG-* licenses to activate the 4X10GE fixed interfaces don't appear to be usable on the MX104 bundle packages (like the MX104-MX5-AC). On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 4:34 AM, Alexander Marhold <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi ! IMHO Edward is right with his assumption: Those are the available licenses for the MX104 Upgrade license to activate 2x10GE P2&3 MX104 S-MX104-ADD-2X10GE Upgrade license to activate 2X10GE P0&1 MX104 S-MX104-UPG-2X10GE Upgrade license to activate 4X10GE fixed ports on MX104 MX104 S-MX104-UPG-4X10GE License to support per VLAN queuing on MX104 MX104 S-MX104-Q Chassis-based software license for inline J-Flow monitoring on MX5, MX10, M40, MX80, and MX104 Series routers MX5, MX10, M40, MX80, and MX104 S-JFLOW-CH-MX5-104 With best regards alexander -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: juniper-nsp [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Im Auftrag von Edward Dore Gesendet: Freitag, 5. Januar 2018 10:21 An: Josh Baird; Juniper List Betreff: Re: [j-nsp] Understanding limitations of various MX104 bundles I believe that the MX104-MX5 bundle is supposed to be locked to only allowing you to make use of a single MIC slot, like the MX5 version of the MX80. As to whether or not that is actually enforced… Edward Dore Freethought Internet On 04/01/2018, 18:34, "juniper-nsp on behalf of Josh Baird" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> on behalf of [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi all, Given the MX104-MX5-AC bundle which comes with 1 20x 1GE MIC pre-installed (and none of the onboard 10Gbps interfaces enabled), is this box actually limited to 20Gbps overall throughput? Can I install another MIC (say the MIC-3D-2XGE-XFP) in an additional slot to gain 2 10Gbps interfaces without purchasing any additional licensing? If I do this, is overall throughput of the chassis still locked to 20Gbps (due to the original bundle)? I can't find anything (ie "show system license") that states there is an overall capacity restriction, but I'm hearing mixed things from various sources. Thanks. _______________________________________________ juniper-nsp mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp _______________________________________________ juniper-nsp mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp _______________________________________________ juniper-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp
