I use BGP extensively to provide dynamic routing between a number of vendors, business partners and affiliated organizations with whom I’m multi-homed to. I recently had to determine if Nortel/Avaya supported eBGP MultiHop on the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 software release 5.x (they do). Thankfully I was able to peer with a Cisco 6500 switch that was sitting behind a Cisco firewall module from an Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 without any significant issues,.
If you are looking for a great resource on BGP I would highly recommend O’Reilly’s book titled BGP.
If you are looking for Avaya/Nortel specific information concerning their BGP implement then you are in luck. Avaya has a technical configuration guide for the ERS 8600 that focuses on BGP. While this is an older document (November 2007) it still does a great job of providing a number of configuration examples and explaining the basics.
In the near future I might need to use an ERS 8606 as an Internet router. I’ll need to peer with the ISP since I’m multi-home to independent Internet Service Providers, although I’m not sure if the 8692SF can handle a full BGP routing table. Has anyone ever tried to feeding a full (or partial) BGP routing table from the Internet to an ERS 8800/8600 switch?
Cheers!
I have not touched the 8600s in a year but the 8692 with the mezz card in an 8606 used to crash after about 10k routes. This was using the 5.0 code.
i was not touching it either, however i found some nortel student’s guides. According to them, 8691SF has maximum 128K forwarding enteries, and 8692SF has up to 256K routes. If that’s true, then it’s too low for today full-view (about 330-350K).
Thanks for the information guys!
Yes, the 8692SF with mezz on 7.0 only supports 250K routes. I don’t think the 8600/8800 platform was designed as an internet backbone router.
All models of the secure router however support 600K routes and was designed to support the full internet routing table.
Rat
I wasn’t intending on taking a full view of the Internet routing table, just a partial view – probably more like just a default route. :) I wouldn’t expect the switch to be able to handle a full view of the entire Internet BGP table.
The issue with the Secure Router when I first looked at it.. it didn’t support Ethernet to Ethernet connectivity. You only had Ethernet on the LAN side and T1/DS3 on the WAN side. I’m not sure if that has changed since way back then. I’m about to start utilizing a Cisco 7301 router, something new to learn.
Thanks for the comment!
Playing with Cisco is always fun. Nice to try something new. Check out the SR 4134. I have only played with it a little bit, but it is modular. You can put up to 72 PoE ports, or gig ports or what have you and use that for your VLAN routing. Then you can slap in whatever WAN ports you need. It also contains SIP survivable gateway and has voice interfaces for connection to PSTN. It seems that the SR gets lost in the marketing shuffle.
It doesn’t appear that the SR 4134 supports an Ethernet to Ethernet routing application/design, only Ethernet to WAN (T1/E1/DS3). I have plenty of ARN/ASNs if I needed a T1/DS3 router.
The large majority of my new deployments are Ethernet to Ethernet or Ethernet to dark fiber (1000BaseLX/1000BaseCWDM). It would be great if the SR product line supported an Ethernet to Ethernet type of routing design.
Unless I’m mistaken the only reasonable Avaya/Nortel options are the ERS 1600 or ERS 5000 series with the Advanced Routing License. I’m currently using a number of ERS 5530s with the Advanced Routing License in as a edge/site router running OSPF with 10GE or 1GE MAN connectivity. I also have a number of ERS 1648s but I’ve been replacing them with ERS 5530s so I can have a 1GE LAN and WAN connection.
Cheers!
Good Day Michael;
I did a project integrating ERS 8600’s into a customer environment for the purpose of doing IPV6 and BGP.
I would say that the Super Mezz card does help, but we were only able to get 80000 routes into the routing table before running short. We didn’t bother with IPV6 routing since at the time, IPV6 BGP routing was not available.
I agree with you completely that the 2007 guide that is mentioned above is pretty good for figuring out the configuration. But the reality is that the SR 2330 or the 4134 are the best bets for BGP but the documentation is poor. I have contacted the Avaya 8600 PLM several times to complain about documentation on these technologies, but no change so far.
Also, I liked the two documents shown on this link below for talking about BGP concepts. The Mini Howto and the BGP Big are worth reading as well.
http://it-services.triumf.ca/sysadmin/networks/documents/bigbgp.ppt/view
Thanks for the feedback JR!