Full BGP Table on ASR 1006 RP2

[Jonathan Bayless]

I am trying to verify if an ASR 1006 with RP2 (8GB RAM), ESP 20 and SIP10 cards can support the current full BGP table (roughly 820k IPv4 prefixes and 84k IPv6 prefixes) without issue. We want to be able to grow over the next few years as well, of course.

It seems quite difficult to verify this capability from documentation so far. I have found information on the ASR 9000 series that indicated different interface/line cards can have different max table sizes so I need to make sure I am looking at the right platform and parts for this upgrade. We are currently on 7606 with RSP720 and have a few months before we expect the route table size to exceed the maximum we can support on this hardware (over 1024k total prefixes).

Any experience or documentation you can provide will be very helpful!

Thanks

[Giuseppe Larosa · Accepted solution]

Hello @Jonathan Bayless ,

if the device doesn't need to move a lot of traffic your choice of HW components is correct.

In real world implementations on customers I have seen memory increased to 16 GB of RAM to handle multiple upstream providers.

So I would suggest you to go directly to 16 GB of RAM.

The ESP 20 gives you 20 Gbps of throughput and it is the mininum for this kind of device.

But if you plan to have multiple 10 GE ports to the upstream providers and to the internal network you must consider a superior model for sure. I would consider a superior ESP as this device is a substitute for a C7600 multilayer switch/router.

Your current device C7600 has no problems in the data plane but as you say its TCAM is near to be full.

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[Jonathan Bayless]

That is correct, the 7600 is sufficient for performance right now other than the TCAM capacity.

Thanks for the confirmation, I was assuming 16GB RAM upgrade would be more or less required but I wanted to get some confirmation.

I am considering a better ESP and SIP40 cards. We generally do around 4 Gbit of throughput at peak times but some extra capacity would be good to have for the future.