I knew with the 720-3BXL's I was running, that eventually the TCAM would become an issue, but it seemed like I still had a little bit of breathing room left. Then I saw the chatter here about the RAM on the RP exhausting before the TCAM, so went peeking at the switch after reading an earlier thread. Sure enough, though TCAM was starting to get full, to my surprise when I looked at memory, it was at 92%, so even closer than the TCAM by far to exhaustion.
I know I can't just up the RAM on the board, so that now leads me to wonder what are reasonable options to resolve this before it becomes a very real and big problem. First let me say, compared to many here we are small guys, we have a limited budget, and our 6509 has served us well for a great many years, I think it's about to pass the 5yr uptime mark. We have 2-3 full feeds as uptime is important, and we also peer at the Equinix IX, so have a bunch of additional peering sessions. So I started looking around, reading various posts here, and talking with a few people I know on how to resolve the 720-3BXL running out of gas before it's a serious problem, but without having to mortgage my home and first born to do it. Some of the suggestions I have seen are as follows. Replace the SUP720-3BXL's with RSP720's, as though the TCAM is still limited, it will remove the issues of RAM being a problem, as the board can handle more RAM, plus the added bonus of a much faster CPU that I am sure would be a plus with BGP. At the cost of a 7606 chassis, it would be no biggie to replace it, heck it would save some rack space. It would also be a fairly cheap upgrade, with re-usability of my GE and 10GE boards. Looking at the DFC's on the interface boards, it looks like there is plenty of room left in the 1G RAM on the boards. Another option I was looking at was adding in an ASR 1004 to handle the BGP connections, and letting the 6500 remain to handle all the local network ports. It looks like using something like a 1004 with RP2 and something like an ESP 20 or 40 would do quite well, and again seems within the range of affordability on the used market. Looking at the datasheets it appears they can easily handle 4 million routes, so that should last a long while. The last suggestion someone tossed out to me was that I shouldn't discount the GSR, something like a GSR 12404 or 12406 with the PRP-2 processors, as I am told they can handle a lot of routes so shouldn't be a problem for the future. I spent some time digging around for info on the GSR, but heck if I could find anything that listed what the BGP route capacity of the suckers were. Any hints on this would be most welcome. In closing, my needs routing BGP wise, would be something with a few GE ports, and a few 10GE ports. As I am guessing I will tie back to the local switch over redundant 10GE links, and we have a few GE transit links, and some fractional 10GE links as well. I see no need for anything at all like 40GE or anything huge like that, so our bandwidth isn't massive. Any ideas or opinions as to what would be a good option, or bad option would be most appreciated, and happy to consider any ideas outside of what I have already looked at. Regards. --- Howard Leadmon _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list cisco-nsp@puck.nether.net https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/