Community discussions

MikroTik App
 
SlouchedOver
just joined
Topic Author
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:03 pm

CHR ROS7 BGP routing and scaling

Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:24 pm

We are about to test ROS7 as a BGP router. After a lot of reading on the forum we will test this on Hyper-V, hyperthreading disabled, and with large CPU caches (thanks to Tom from north Idaho for his helpful posts).

However our concerns are the following:

1) We need to take IXP BGP peering (100k + routes)
2) We need to take 3 full BGP tables from 3 transit operators
3) We need to be able to support 10Gbps+ traffic

Is Mikrotik even an option for this? We've used the CCR1072s in the past but BGP routing has always been an issue on the old ROS6 and the Tilera CPUs. It's our hope that with the new ROS7 this can now be eliminated as BGP routing can happen across multiple cores.

Our first test config is:

4 x Xeon 2.9Ghz CPUs with large cache buffers
64GB x DDR3 RAM
250GB SSDs
Dell X710 QSFP+ NICs

Kevin from IPArchitechts showed that with ROS6xx throughput was limited to around 4.4Gbps on 1500byte packets and very severely limited with smaller packet sizes. It's our hope that we can see better performance now with ROS7.

Has anyone tested ROS7 for BGP routing to this extent yet? Is there a way to take multiple transit providers with full BGP feeds AND support 10Gbps+ throughput? We were contemplating splitting each transit operator into their own CHR but even then, we'll still have to have some kind of aggregated BGP router at the end of the day which defeats the purpose. Any advice or experience here would be appreciated.
 
ivantirado
just joined
Posts: 20
Joined: Sun May 12, 2019 4:58 am

Re: CHR ROS7 BGP routing and scaling

Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:01 am

There’s two separate things in your post. One is the performance of BGP in terms of convergence and updates. The other is packet forwarding rates. Based on feedback in the forum, you can expect decent BGP convergence performance using those Xeon CPUs. The bigger problem with the current Ros is the memory support due to 32 bit...

As far as packet forwarding that will depend on the features used, etc.. are you using things like queues, vpns or other features? Can you use fast path or fasttrack? Is IPv6 in use?

Since you have a test bench, go ahead and test and let us know results... seems like a solid plan.
 
SlouchedOver
just joined
Topic Author
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:03 pm

Re: CHR ROS7 BGP routing and scaling

Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:46 am

There’s two separate things in your post. One is the performance of BGP in terms of convergence and updates. The other is packet forwarding rates. Based on feedback in the forum, you can expect decent BGP convergence performance using those Xeon CPUs. The bigger problem with the current Ros is the memory support due to 32 bit...
Convergence we expect should be good. We are running a quick and small test now on 4 x vCPUs and we're seeing all vCPUs handle the BGP load well.
As far as packet forwarding that will depend on the features used, etc.. are you using things like queues, vpns or other features? Can you use fast path or fasttrack? Is IPv6 in use?
No other features in use. All queues, vpns etc happen on other boxes in our design. We take ipv6 in BGP but no ipv6 is in use by our clients. This box is purely to handle BGP routing only so fastpath will be enabled. We've never used fasttrack in our network before. We haven't even looked at this option before.

We'll try to post test results once we have them standardised and have our setup optimised.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 16 guests