[Xorp-users] XORP versions

[Mikael Johansson]

> In the context of virtualization, you can run multiple XORP
> instances, but only for unicast protocols (BGP probably excluded due
> to some short-term reasons), and only on Linux which supports
> multiple unicast forwarding tables.
> You can't run do this for multicast. One of the reasons is that the
> UNIX kernel allows only a single instance of the special multicast
> routing socket.

We need to do multicast too, so running multiple XORP instances is
probably not the solution for us.

We don't even necessarily need multiple forwarding tables (although it
would be preferable). A kind of a hack which would do almost
everything we need would be to somehow be able to control which routes
are advertised to which OSPF or BGP neighbor, and there are different
configurations. For example if a device has two BGP neighbors and two
OSPF neighbors, the routes from one BGP neighbor could  be advertised
to only one OSPF neighbor. I don't think this is possible in XORP.


> If you want to run multiple XORP instances, please drop us an email,
> so we can give you the technical details (they are not in the in the
> user documentation yet).
>
> If you use XORP on top of Xen or Vmware, then you are practically
> running multiple OS instances, so the above limitations don't
> apply.
>
> An alternative solution is to use IMUNES:
> http://www.imunes.net/
> http://www.tel.fer.hr/imunes/
>
> It virtualizes the kernel networking stack itself and is extremely
> lightweight. It also has a very cool GUI which gives you lots of
> control over the virtual topology management.
> It is available for FreeBSD, so if you don't have OS requirements
> I'd strongly recommend considering it.
> Marko Zec (who wrote IMUNES) is on this mailing list and can give
> you more information about it.

We also need to run another application which is only for Linux, so we
can't use FreeBSD.

Regards,
Mikael