OER on 7606

[george_daly]

I have two 7606s with 720 supervisors on the network edge and 3 gigabit connections with different providers.

There is a requirement to be able to control how much outbound traffic goes up what link.

I was hoping to use the Optimized Edge Routing functionality Cisco introduced in IOS 12.3(8)T but apparently the 7606 doesn't support IOS versions > 12.2 (this strikes me as odd as lower spec routers do support > 12.2)

I would be really grateful if someone could confirm the following:

a) Is it the case that 7606 routers with 720 supervisors don't support 12.3?

b) Is there a decent alternative which anyone could suggest?

[gpulos]

please use the Feature Navigator to determine what IOS versions support what features on your 7600 series router. (do a search by platform)

see the link below for the feature navigator:

http://tools.cisco.com/ITDIT/CFN/jsp/index.jsp

[george_daly]

Thanks, this did confirm it for me. I'm still puzzled as to why lower spec routers do support OER whereas the 7606 doesn't, I guess its time to look into an alternative!

Thanks again for the pointer.

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello George,

multilayer switches like c7606 are supposed to be core, backbone devices for this reason if your enterprise network is multihomed the best choice is the BGP protocol you can find a lot of examples of how to use BGP to perform this task.

look for BGP case studies on CCO

hope to help

giuseppe dr larosa

CCIE SP 14802

[george_daly]

Thanks Giuseppe, I appreciate your comments. I have BGP peering setup already for my 2 AS's, I'm sure there is more I can do with BGP, it's just about attaining the know-how, I will do some case-study reading up.

My reasoning behind using OER was that I have differing pricing schemes with different bandwidth providers.

So for example I would want to config the following, using 2 1Gb circuits:

o Use all available bandwidth up to 1Gb on circuit A

o Use up to 400Mb on circuit B (> 400Mb means more $)

o If circuit A goes down use all available bandwidth on circuit B.

Future expansion is going to introduce much more pricing complexity, and OER seems to cater for monetary concerns with bandwidth usage in just the way I'm looking for.

Anyway, I will spend some quality time with BGP and see where I get to.

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello george,

you can implement complex policies using BGP and route-maps with multiple blocks.

The very famous book "Internet Routing Architectures" written by Halabi is an excellent information source.

as far as i know OER can implement complex policies and it can use the results of automated performance tests (=extended pings) to manage the usage of links to different ISPs.OER can be a sort of load balancer in the IOS box, but it requires careful tuning if any default settings is not ok for your needs.

You can map the pricing scheme using BGP attributes like MED, local preference.

hope to help

giuseppe larosa

[george_daly]

Really appreciate the time you took to answer my questions Giuseppe, many thanks.