Traffic Shapping - Platform requirments

[george]

I have the foolowing scenario:

In a Service Provider environment, 2x Cisco 7401ASR routers are used for ADSL aggregation and NAT points to the backbone network. These routers are haddling 30Mbps traffic and 1000 translations each. The requirment is to provide classes of service using traffic shaping to different customer groups. Both routers are operating at 50-60% average CPU load. Would it be recomended to introduce the traffic shaping at these routers for 30Mbps (to much load propably)? What would be the recommended Cisco router/platform to meet this requirment?

Thanks,

./George

[mchin345]

The next platform of Cisco 7401ASR routers are Cisco 7600 Series Routers,Cisco 10000 Series Routers.

The Cisco 7600 Series is a natural evolution for existing Cisco 7500 Series customers, with Cisco IOS Software feature parity and FlexWAN support for existing Cisco 7200/7500 Series port adapters. The Cisco 7600 Series also offers multigigabit capacity per slot, various form factors, and advanced optical service modules for high-performance service delivery. Intelligent Ethernet broadband aggregation, powered by the multiprocessor WAN applications module, delivers Ethernet Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) access concentrator or high-density L2TP network server subscriber services on the Cisco 7600 Series.

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[b-watkins]

30mbps isn't very much traffic to be getting 50-60% CPU load. What do you get if you issue a 'show pxf interfaces' ?

It sounds like you have a lot of traffic (or all of it) getting punted to the RP. What version of software are you running?

Anyway, in general I would look to see if there is something that's causing traffic not to be using the PXF path.

If there are features that you require that prevent PXF from being used, then perhaps you could try disabling it.

And last, if even then the CPU utilization is too high to support the addition of traffic shaping, you could perhaps look into a 7301. It's much like the 7401 except that it uses essentially an NPE-G1 instead of an NSE-1 as its RP. This would give you much more CPU for CPU-intensive configs.

[george]

Thanks for your reply,

The router is running IOS version 12.3(5a)

The show pxf interfaces output is:

Intf I/f # Attributes

Gi0/0 3 IP, Encap, Unsupp Feat.

Gi0/1 2 IP, Encap, Unsupp Feat.

AT1/0 4 IP, Encap, Unsupp Feat.

The router is being used for configuring NAT and ACL per ADSL user (about 1000 concurent sessions) and that is most probably eating the PXF processor. The requirment is to have Traffic Shapping for each and one user and this most probably requires a lot of CPU which by the way i don't think that it is supported on the PXF and has to be done on the main CPU.

./G

[b-watkins]

It's clear from your 'show pxf interfaces' that there is some feature that that the PXF processor doesn't support. It may be beneficial to disable the PXF processor, though I still doubt that you'd have enough overhead available to support per-user traffic shaping.

It may be wise to see if the 7301 would suit your needs. It's much faster than a 7401 for things that can't be PXF-accelerated, so it may well be what you're looking for.

BTW, the MQC is supported in PXF with newer versions of IOS (starting with 12.2(15)B and 12.3(4)T), but it would seem even that won't help since there are features that prevent you from using PXF.

[george]

I too believe that C7401 will not do the job.I will look into C7301.It seems that some NAT functionality is passed through the PXF to the main CPU.

Thanks a lot for your help.

./G