[AusNOG] Looking at Juniper core switches

[Rhys Hanrahan]

Thanks Jake, appreciate the feedback.

Looks like MPLS is going to be the trickiest to verify – I know previous Juniper switches have only had basic MPLS support with hardware limitations (e.g. with the EX4500 I believe it only supports single labels so the uses are limited). Although the MPLS support on the QFX5100s looks pretty extensive, it’s unclear for example if you can do VPLS on these units. Apparently you can do E-VPN but only using VXLAN as the transport, not MPLS.

Thanks.

Rhys Hanrahan
Chief Information Officer
Nexus One Pty Ltd

E: support at nexusone.com.au<mailto:support at nexusone.com.au>
P: +61 2 9191 0606
W: http://www.nexusone.com.au/
M: PO Box 127, Royal Exchange NSW 1225
A: Level 10 307 Pitt St, Sydney NSW 2000

[ttp://quintus.nexusone.com.au/~rhys/nexus1-email-sig.jpg]


From: Jacob Taylor <me at jacobtaylor.id.au>
Date: Monday, 5 November 2018 at 2:07 pm
To: Rhys Hanrahan <rhys at nexusone.com.au>
Cc: "ausnog at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net>
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Looking at Juniper core switches

We our fair share of QFX5100s about the place, mainly using MC-LAG and BGP features, in addition to VC in other deployments.

We've had some hardware defects previously but they were swiftly resolved through JTAC.

For BGP (and I think MPLS) you need a separate Advanced Features License.

Can’t say much for CoS.

FYI I believe you can only use either MC-LAG or VC, not both at the same time. Happy to be proven wrong though.

Additionally they support VC Fabric in a spine/leaf topology, allowing the entire network to effectively act as one giant switch.
Unsurprisingly this is yet another license though.

While we primarily deal with another vendor in L3 VXLAN deployments (Mellanox/Cumulus) the switches are certainly capable of VXLAN and EVPN.

Cheers,
Jake


On 5 Nov 2018, at 1:52 pm, Rhys Hanrahan <rhys at nexusone.com.au<mailto:rhys at nexusone.com.au>> wrote:

Hi All,

Just wanted to see if anyone has any experience or recommendations on some core switches. We’re looking at upgrading our core switches in Sydney and right now I’m looking at Juniper models. Right now, we need a model with at least 40x 10/1 Gbps ports, and the ability to do Virtual Chassis, MC-LAG and CoS queueing per port. We’re currently using Juniper EX4500s.

At the moment I am looking primarily at: Junper’s QFX 5100-48S as our replacement. From everything I’ve seen this looks like a solid option to go with and gives us a path to add more functionality to our core network over time. If anyone has any feedback on this particular model I’d be really keen to hear it. In particular I’m interested in:


  *   48x 10/1Gbps + 6x 40 Gbps QSFP ports.
  *   Virtual chassis via QSFP ports, enabling MC-LAG to our top of rack switches.
  *   Looks to have full CoS support.

So unless there’s any major caveats this is probably what we’ll go with. In terms of future feature use this seems to cover us as it appears to have:


  *   Pretty much full MPLS support (I’m relatively green with MPLS but we likely want to move to an MPLS core in the future, and this looks to support everything we’d potentially want). Except perhaps BFD for MPLS.


  *   Full VXLAN Support – another feature we would probably leverage if we went to a full MPLS core, with spine-leaf configuration.


  *   I plan to get rid of virtual chassis eventually and go all layer 3/MPLS instead.

As far as I understand for VXLAN rollouts, you need VXLAN on the top of rack switches to act as VTEPs. So for a second phase of upgrades, we would likely be looking at QFX5100-48S for all our top of rack switches, and these core QFXs would be swapped with dual QFX 5100-24Qs

Any feedback or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Rhys Hanrahan
Chief Information Officer
Nexus One Pty Ltd

E: support at nexusone.com.au<mailto:support at nexusone.com.au>
P: +61 2 9191 0606<tel:+61%202%209191%200606>
W: http://www.nexusone.com.au/
M: PO Box 127, Royal Exchange NSW 1225
A: Level 10 307 Pitt St, Sydney NSW 2000

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