What Cisco Platforms support GRE Tunneling

[jesnowakb]

Hi!

I used to have 2 Catalyst 6500 with VSS in my core as end point GRE tunneling. My company decided to change this switches with Nexus 7000 but the tunnel that I created is really slow (it is used to replicate remote data bases). I guess this happends becuase Nexus does GRE over software (please correct me if I'm wrong), so can someone tell me what cisco router can I put in my network to create the tunnel. According to the data sheet, the 2900 series routers support GRE, will thi be a good solution?

My provider is giving me a BW of 250Mbps in this WAN link between the Nexus 7k and the remote router (Catalyst 4500).

Thanks!

[sumit menaria]

Well Cisco IOS 12.0 and above IOS-XE 2.1 and above as well as NX-OS 4.0 and above support GRE. Now we are running GRE over 2920 ISRs and it works smooth for both our enterprise customers as well as traffic towards the internet.However since you have issues with the Nexus 7000 ,did you check any issues related to MTU which may be causing slowness.

Cheers

Sumit

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[jesnowakb]

Hi sumitmenaria 

Thanks for your reply. Can you tell me what is the difference in performance between a software based GRE tunnel and a hardware based. Also, do you know if the GRE tunnel that Nexus creates is a software based or a hardwared based? There are Nexus 7710, N77-SUP2E

Thanks

[Rolf Fischer]

I'm also interested in Cisco platform recommendations for GRE endpoints.

Some time ago we used ISRs (first generation, 38xx) as GRE endpoints over 100 mbps links, which worked well; but after the provider increased the link-bandwidth to 1 Gbps we found out that our ISRs were not capable of handling higher bandwidth over the GRE-tunnels.

Our Catalyst 6500, on the other hand, can easily handle such loads over tunnels but unfortunately have limited QoS-capabilities (no hierarchical policies for outgoing tunnel-traffic).