[Xorp-users] Anyone using XORP in live production environment with big traffic load?

[Morten Pedersen]

Thanks Mark. This is exactly what I was looking for.

I also were planning on going for a Dell 2950, but obviously need to use some more time finding the correct system.

I had a brief look at todays number of packets, and can foresee approx. 2-4Mpps for the next 3-5 years. We have a general mix of all packet-sizes, giving us approx. 1Mpps for 10Gbit of traffic.

Thus, I shouldn't go over the 7Mpps limit as described in your paper.

Since I am planning on two dual 10Gbit network cards, I need at least two PCI Express 1.1 x16 (number of lanes) to be able to take the bandwith.

PCIe 1.1 x16 can handle 32Gbit of total bandwith.

What needs more research from my point of view now, is the following:

* AMD vs Intel. It seems obvious that L2 cache is critical. I need to see which quad core processor gives me the most.
* Intel 10Gbit network cards. Will I run into issues here?

As described earlier, I am planning on setting this up in a production environment, building two similar XORP software routers. They will serve a mix of all packet sizes, and do BGP routing. I am thinking about using iBGP between the two routers to have them syncronized at all times. If one goes down, the other can take over immediately. Each router is connected to Norways Internet eXhange switch, but resides at two physical locations.

We already have this up and running using Cisco equipment, should be possible to do it with XORP as well. I'll get back to this when I start writing the config for it.

If anyone have more input to me about this, I would appreciate it. Also, if XORP is mature enough to be used in a live production environment. Still haven't heard of anyone using it ;-)


Thanks,

Morten



----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Handley" <M.Handley at cs.ucl.ac.uk>
To: "Morten Pedersen" <morten at workzone.no>
Cc: "xorp-users" <xorp-users at xorp.org>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 11:44:49 PM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
Subject: Re: [Xorp-users] Anyone using XORP in live production environment with big traffic load?

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Morten Pedersen <morten at workzone.no> wrote:
> Ouch.
>
> I didn't consider memory latency, that will of course be a issue. I would be interested in reading your draft research paper. We might get into trouble here, since we have a mix of both regular web-traffic together with unicast video and audio streams in different formats :(

I've put a draft of our virtual routers paper here:
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/vrouter-perf.pdf

The main focus of the paper is on virtualization, but the first half
of the paper is mostly about the performance of generic software
routers.

- Mark