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sirbryan
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Hooray for Layer 3 routing (L3HW Offload)!

Sat Sep 24, 2022 7:23 pm

Today I've successfully migrated customer traffic off an RB4011 to a NetFiber 9 (CRS310) running 7.4. At present the CPU could handle the bulk of the site's traffic if needed (in a pinch), but easily spikes to 80% CPU when offloading is disabled. Once enabled, it drops to 0-5% and uses around 6W @ 48V.

The router is running OSPF, iBGP, and DHCP for about 150 subscribers, with a mix of MikroTik 60GHz and Ubiquiti LTU & Wave subscribers, most of them 200Mbps+ capable. No NAT, minimal firewall (for the router itself), all internal routes.

I look forward to deploying more L3HW-enabled switches as site routers.
 
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Re: Hooray for Layer 3 routing (L3HW Offload)!

Sat Sep 24, 2022 9:49 pm

Awesome!

I've been wanting to use CRS switches as L3 devices throughout the network for quite a while and now that the software is catching up, it's going to be a great inexpensive L3 switch. CCR2116 also has a Marvell ASIC in it and is a strong contender for a single device at a tower, distribution point or at a higher end customer.

Now that IPv6 is added you can have IPv4 and IPv6 in hw offload as of 7.6 which I suspect will move to stable in the next 3 to 4 weeks.

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sirbryan
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Re: Hooray for Layer 3 routing (L3HW Offload)!

Sun Sep 25, 2022 5:41 am

Yeah, I've got three CCR2116's handling large BGP feeds (filtered down to one AS away), one with two providers, one with a third provider, and a third in the middle, all doing L3HW offload. The middle one is at 0% load while passing 2Gbps. The two routers facing external peers run at about 6%, with the profiler showing "routing" as the top CPU hog (BGP updates and filtering, I presume). That's down from 11-15% for the two external routers and 5-10% for the internal router.

A fourth 2116 handles my data center NAT and a fifth my office. With NAT in the mix, routing gets a little wonky and I end up only leaving L3HW offload on the switch and off of all the ports.

I bought a few CRS310's and NetFiber 9's to handle 10G aggregation at my ring hub sites (from 2 to 10Gbps for 2-3 backbone links with 10Gbps handoff) and had originally thought to hand the 10Gbps to RB4011's or RB5009's at the site. With L3HW offloading, I can repurpose the 4011/5009's and keep a good mix of routing and switching in one box.

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