Yeah, true enough … there was a very large cable provider in the USA that I did consulting work for several years ago – they were running backbone area in OSPF (single area 0) with over 650k routes! No, it was not ideal and convergence was “challenging” to say the least. It wasn’t why I was working with them but really stood out …. I politely suggested they might want to look at dividing up into regional areas or something along those lines either in OSPF or migrate to ISIS (which was better potential solution for their specific MPLS requirements at that time).
From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Justin Wilson - MTIN Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2015 8:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Some OSPF Questions... Areas came to being when routers had 32 megs of ram small processors. It was mainly a mechanism to cut down on cpu/memory utilization. Areas have advantages in certain designs, but not like they used to. Justin Wilson [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> --- http://www.mtin.net Owner/CEO xISP Solutions- Consulting – Data Centers - Bandwidth http://www.midwest-ix.com COO/Chairman Internet Exchange - Peering - Distributed Fabric On Sep 8, 2015, at 8:11 PM, Paul Stewart <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Yup … have seen some *really* large networks run everything in backbone area … In previous job, we had 6000+ routes in backbone area with no noticeable issues. Paul From: Af [ <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mathew Howard Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2015 3:28 PM To: af < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Some OSPF Questions... I have everything in area 0 too, and we've get well over 100 routers running OSPF and I really don't see any good reason to change it at this point. On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 2:08 PM, George Skorup < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> wrote: I run the backbone/area 0 only. But I have less than 15 routers speaking OSPF. Convergence time is fine so I see no reason to go to multi-area any time soon. On 9/8/2015 12:39 PM, Christopher Gray wrote: Can an area have multiple ABR routers connecting to area 0 (Is there any way to add redundancy to an area)? How big is too big for an OSPF database (At what point should one really start using areas)? With Mikrotik hardware, if there is no current need for VPLS tunnels or MPLS-TE, is there any benefit to running MPLS vs just OSPF? [I'm running it on some my network, and I'm debating whether to take the time to implement it everywhere.] Thanks - Chris
