Cisco 6506 or 7606

[blackmetal]

Hello,

i have 2-4gbps bps and during attacks 4-5m pps and i want to lunch 10-12x GRE tunnel and total trafic for gre tunels are around 500-600mbps and i have 3x 10G uplink from different ip transtis and i have full bpg table from them so i have 2 options in my stock :

Cisco 7606+RSP720-CXL

Cisco 6506 SUP720-BXL

which one is suitable for me?

i have read 7606 and i see it can handle gre in hardware but i could not find how much gre traffic it can handle in the tunnel, any idea/

thanks,

[balaji.bandi]

as per my knowledge both are end of Life

still you like to use with risk - Cisco 7606 - is more preferred.

[blackmetal]

in 7606 datasheet does not mentioned how much gre tunnel they can handle ? is there any specification ?

i see 6506 datasheet and it says it can handle 400m gre tunnel but i did not find anything with 7606

[balaji.bandi]

i am sure 7606 more powerfull than 6K so it should be ok, yes as mentioned in hardware*

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/7600-series-routers/product_data_sheet0900aecd8057f3b6.html

[blackmetal]

how much gre traffic can 7606 handle?

6500 datasheet says it can handle 400m but i did not find anything for 7606

[Scott Hodgdon]

@blackmetal ,

I have attached a PDF of the GRE capabilities and packet walks for Sup720. There is a performance and scalability section where t talks about how many millions of packets per second the platform can do. This would be regardless of packet size, so if you have larger frames then you will get more bandwidth.

Cheers,
Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Group

[balaji.bandi]

out of intrest what does this mean - GRE  in hardware

[Scott Hodgdon]

balaji,

It means that GRE is handled by the forwarding engine (PFC3 in this case) and not the CPU. If it was handled by the CPU, we would refer to it as "GRE in software". 

On a Sup720, GRE is recirculated, meaning that it makes 2 passes through the forwarding engine. This is why max pps is lower for GRE traffic than for non-GRE traffic.

Cheers,
Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Group

[balaji.bandi]

I was guessed  the same - cheers for confirm the same. !

[blackmetal]

Thank you for the explaination,

So as i understand 7606 can handle 10-15x gre tunnel without any issue and little cpu usages?

Totall bps for all gre tunnels are 500-600m and total pps is 50k-80k

[balaji.bandi]

that is correct as @Scott Hodgdon  shared document - good learning.

[blackmetal]

@Scott Hodgdon 

Thank you for your explaination,

if i want to use 6506+SUP720-BXL do you think it can handle 2-3gbps bps and 3-5m pps including 10-12x gre tunnel ? my gre tunnel bps is around 400-600k (total gre tunnels) 

because i read https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-6500-series-switches/product_data_sheet09186a0080159856.html and it says WS-SUP720-3BXL has hardware assist it does not mentioned any value,

[Scott Hodgdon]

@blackmetal ,

Hardware assisted just means that there is some CPU involved in programming the PFC3BXL CEF tables (See

"GRE and the Route Processor' section in the document). Once that programming is done, the traffic in the tunnel is forwarded by the PFC3BXL ASIC infrastructure. This is how we can get many millions of packets per seconds of performance. That is regardless of packet size, so as long as you have a link that can do 2-3gbps then we can support. In that document is Table 3 that shows "CPU utilization with GRE Tunnels with active data", so you can get an idea about CPU impact with a certain number of tunnels.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Group

[blackmetal]

@Scott Hodgdon 

thank you for your friendly support, i see that table <1000 tunnel uses around %2 cpu usages so with 6506+SUP720-BXL if my link capacity will be enough i can lunch 10-12x gre tunnels with 500-600k pps and 500m-1gbps without any issue, right?

Thank you.

[Scott Hodgdon]

@blackmetal ,

As long as "x" is less than 208 , yes you are OK . 

Cheers,
Scott Hodgdon

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Group