Thanks for all of the replies (on and off list). It is appreciated. Scaling in this context is simply adding more and more routers and needing/wanting to avoid configuring full mesh iBGP due to the administrative burden of maintaining the growing size of full mesh topology. In one particular network in question, I have 11 routers fully meshed and need to add several more over the coming 6-12 months, possibly adding as many as 10 more routers in that time span. I'd prefer not to continue doing full mesh.
As for 7206VXR with NPE-G1 or G2 cards, we have many sitting in a decommissioned state on shelves as well as a few still alive serving a handful of T-1 lines and various other legacy connections of that sort. These little 7200's sit and run, forever near as I can tell. As many routers in this network do contain full route eBGP connections I will strongly consider your suggestion of avoiding using the 7200's due to potential memory constraints and CPU/convergence time capabilities. I don't think I have done any full table feeds on a 7200 in many years (days of 200k-300k table size days) This fits in with the kind of feedback I was hoping for, Thanks! ________________________________________ From: NANOG [[email protected]] on behalf of Leo Bicknell [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 7:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: BGP Route Reflector - Route Server, Router, etc In a message written on Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 08:32:44PM +0000, Justin Krejci wrote: > I am working on some network designs and am adding some additional routers to > a BGP network. I'd like to build a plan of changing all of the existing > routers over from full iBGP mesh to something more scalable (ie route > reflection). You might want to better define "scalable". I don't know your background or network so I can't guess. I can say I've seen the inner workings of some large ISP networks with a lot of hosts in iBGP that work fine, and then people with 5 routers try and tell me they have a scaling problem. What is your actual problem? Memory usage? Convergence time? Configuring the sessions? Staff understanding of how it works? > I am wondering if people can point me in the direction to some good resource > material on how to select a good BGP route reflector design. Should I just > dust off some 7206VXR routers to act as route reflectors? This is a red flag to me, relative to the questions above. The 7206VXR, even with an NPE-G2, is a 1.5Ghz Power PC with a paltry 2GB of DRAM. It was not speedy when new, being roughly equivilent to the PowerPC G4 processors in Apple Laptops at the time. It is approximately 8 times slower than a current iPhone. Seriously. If convergence time is anything you care about, a 7206VXR is a very bad choice. It may also run out of memory if you have a lot of edges with full tables. So what's the actual "scaling" problem? -- Leo Bicknell - [email protected] PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
