2821 Powerful enough?

[brett]

I am looking at a new router for a small office. It will have an ADSL2+ WAN link and a small LAN segment consisting of 10 workstations. There will also be a DMZ with a few servers on it (Web & Mail etc).

I would also like to set up a VPN for outside access when people are working away.

We will also be installing a VoIP solution using CCME.

Should the 2821 handle this situation and still throughput what the ADSL 2+ can handle? (We are about 500 meters from the exchange so we get good speeds).

Other services running will be QoS and Firewalls etc.

Thanks for any feed back.

[wochanda]

Here is a good doc that'll give you an idea about the routers throughput:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/765/tools/quickreference/routerperformance.pdf

So judging from this, a 2821 should push ~87PPS with NO features active.

I believe 2800's have hardware VPN built in, so unless i'm mistaken that shouldn't impact performance.

QoS and FW on the other hand will hit the router hard for performance. While you're results my vary, i'd plan on only getting 40% of optimum forwarding with these services configured, or about 30Mbps. So it should be able to handle your ADSL2+.

If you want to keep an eye on it to make sure you aren't hitting the boundaries of the router, just do a 'show proc cpu history' and make sure the #'s aren't sitting above 85% during your worst times.

[Adam Frederick]

I have 2821's at all of my branch locations... each branch encompasses around 20+ users, IP Phone Systems, IP ATMs & Application servers. For redundancy, each branch has a minimum of 3 - T1's and the secondary T1s are utilized using policy routing for our own policies. With QoS, Firewall, IPS & users pulling tons of Oracle & SQL traffic, I have yet to see anything over 10% utilization. At the core I have a 3845 serving over 100+ nodes that all the 2821's tie back into and this box never see's overs 10% utilization. I think you will be fine, if you weren't going with the CCME I would even say go with a 2811.