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Pfr routing in production?

s-pirrello
Level 1
Level 1

Hello All,

I was wondering if anyone out there has successfully deployed Performance Routing in a medium to large sized network.  It sounds interesting but was concerned with the stability and load it adds to routers.  We currently have 90% 2811 with two T1s and several 2851s with DS3 circuits. 

Has anyone used these routers or similar model for PfR and experienced success?  My intention is to use this technology to perform quick reroutes when our MPLS provider(s) have issues within the mesh that is unable to be detected on the edge access circuit.

Any insight would be very much appreciated.

2 Replies 2

Fabrice Ducomble
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

There are quite a lot of PfR implementations using 28xx as BRs and/or MC/BR. This of course all depends on number of prefixes/applications you are about to control via PfR. Less than 100 should not have much impact on CPU.

Regarding fast convergence, this requires active probing with 'mode monitor fast' so typically only available for WAN optimization (not for Internet edge deployement where probes might get filtered) which I guess is your case.

Hope this helps,

Fabrice

Steve Lyons
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

PfR provides several capabilities for routing traffic:

1) Provide load balancing

2) Provide link capacity management

3) Route based on application requirements

4) Route around soft network errors (i.e.: brown outs, black outs, etc)

PfR can monitor external links of a router to determine if they are exceeding user defined capacity thresholds. PfR can ensure load balancing is occurring between external interfaces of a router. PfR can also make routing decisions on behalf of network applications and their requirements.

We see many deployments of PfR on the ISR router platforms. I would recommend taking a baseline of system health (i.e.: cpu usage, memory usage, etc) before and after enabling PfR. My experience with PfR has been the cpu and memory usage is very low.

Each ISR and ASR platform scales to support a certain number of active applications and or prefixes. I would recommend contacting your Cisco Account Team or open a TAC case to obtain numbers per platform.

You might also want to check out our PfR FAQ page which provides answers to many common questions: http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Performance_Routing_FAQs

Best Regards,

Steve Lyons - Cisco

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