Horse power needed for GRE Tunneling and Frame R. ?

[dan]

I need to setup up several GRE tunnels with Frame Relay between

two international locations and am wondering if the remote locations

will be able to get by with a Cisco 2600 or 3600. The remote connections

will have bandwidth ranging from 512 to 2048. Traffic should be in the

area of 1000 - 3000 frames per second.

What will the router need to have enough just to

handle the IOS (12. T) needed to do the tunneling. Secondly,

will a 2600 be a wise choice for this project or should I go with

the 3600 series routers?

Thanks, in advance.

Dan

[vkasacavage]

It's really going to depend on what is going on at the remote sites, but the 2600 should do fine. If you are looking at doing GRE tunnels over the internet, I would recommend doing IPSec tunnels and running GRE through them. The 2600 should be capable of that as well

[dan]

What are the benefits of using IPSec vs just a regular GRE tunnel.

Dan

[vkasacavage]

IPSec will encrypt the data passing, GRE will not. IPSec however will not pass multicast traffic, such as routing updates (as an example) so you would want to run a GRE tunnel through the IPSec tunnel. Note that this will add bandwidth overhead as well as processor overhead.

So, the answer is it depends on how security minded you are....if you are ok with passing data in the clear over the internet....GRE is fine, if you want to encrypt that data, add IPSec

[thisisshanky]

2600 has enuf horsepower to do this stuff!

[wkumari]

To some extent it depends on how many tunnels, etc.

A 2600 that is not very busy doing lots of other things (like lots of huge ACL's, unstable large OSPF, etc) will be just fine doing GRE tunnels. If you need encryption, a 2600 doing IPSec (with ESP) is likely to have some problems keeping up. For your money what might be a better solution is to offload the IPSec onto something like a Netscreen-5. They are great little boxes, nice and cheap and do IPSec in hardware and so are speedy.

I do not suggest getting a 3600 series router. Once you have a 3600 configured the way you want it, it is geting close the the same price as a 7200, which is a WAY more capable box. You can also add hardware to a 7200 do offload the encryption if you need to...