Can Cisco N9K-C93180YC-FX be used as router ?

[Kartoff]

Hello,

I watch these switches since their price on eBay was about $15000 but now they are way more cheaper and you could buy one for about $1000 or less.
Regarding this and what I have read in these switches datasheet I started wondering if they can be used as routers as well.

Cisco Nexus 9300-FX Series Switches Data Sheet

This data sheet describes the benefits, specifications, and ordering information for the Cisco Nexus 9300-FX Series Switches.

www.cisco.com

This datasheet says that especially FX one supports 1 792 000 v4 and 896 000 v6 prefixes which is more than full BGP table.
The interesting thing is that only N9K-C93180YC-FX have such parameters, not even one of the others from 9th series.

I'm sure here are many people that may deal with such switches one way or another and would be able to resolve my mystery.

For example we need router that can do 5-10 eBGP sessions to some of the Tier 1 providers IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack. Just this, nothing extra needed.
For now we are using Linux servers and some Mikrotik for this but they can't hold as much bandwidth as we may need.

 

[frankharv]

These run by licenses so you have to make sure they have the right license to be used as router.

Enterprise LAN is what you need.

FATSO# show license usage
Feature                      Ins  Lic   Status Expiry Date Comments
                                 Count
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16P_UPG_PKG                   No    -   Unused             -
32P_LIC_PKG                   No    -   Unused             -
24P_N3K_LIC_PKG               No    -   Unused             -
48P_N3K_UPG_PKG               No    -   Unused             -
LAN_BASE_SERVICES_PKG         Yes   -   Unused Never       -
LAN_ENTERPRISE_SERVICES_PKG   Yes   -   Unused Never       -
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[frankharv]

Dumb question but what can a Nexus 9K do that Nexus 3K can't? Sure higher throughtput. more this and that. Do you need it?
I got 24 ports of 40G for $120 that is way more than I need.
This 40G can be easily split into 4x10G too.
I had N9K on my list but my budget prevailed. Lowly N3K.

I am pretty sure the LAN-Enterprise license is the same feature-wise across the Nexus platforms.

I am only referencing 3K here because it runs in 9K mode for commands.
So its not that different hardware. Are Nexus power supplies interchangeable between models?

The N93xx are newer than N9xxx correct?

 

[frankharv]

Looking at the N3K I have it pales in comparison.

Cisco Nexus 3100-V Platform Switches Data Sheet

This data sheet describes the benefits, specifications, and ordering information for the Cisco Nexus 3100-V Platform Switches.

www.cisco.com

16,000 prefixes and 16,000 host entries

versus

1,792,000

 

[Kartoff]

These run by licenses so you have to make sure they have the right license to be used as router.

Enterprise LAN is what you need.

FATSO# show license usage
Feature                      Ins  Lic   Status Expiry Date Comments
                                 Count
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16P_UPG_PKG                   No    -   Unused             -
32P_LIC_PKG                   No    -   Unused             -
24P_N3K_LIC_PKG               No    -   Unused             -
48P_N3K_UPG_PKG               No    -   Unused             -
LAN_BASE_SERVICES_PKG         Yes   -   Unused Never       -
LAN_ENTERPRISE_SERVICES_PKG   Yes   -   Unused Never       -
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I know about licenses and this not answering the question.

 

[Kartoff]

Dumb question but what can a Nexus 9K do that Nexus 3K can't? Sure higher throughtput. more this and that. Do you need it?
I got 24 ports of 40G for $120 that is way more than I need.
This 40G can be easily split into 4x10G too.
I had N9K on my list but my budget prevailed. Lowly N3K.

I am pretty sure the LAN-Enterprise license is the same feature-wise across the Nexus platforms.

I am only referencing 3K here because it runs in 9K mode for commands.
So its not that different hardware. Are Nexus power supplies interchangeable between models?

The N93xx are newer than N9xxx correct?

This is something totally out of topic Nexus 9K I am talking about can do many things that Nexus 3K can't ! Especially when we are talking about routing Read some datasheets, compare them and you would answer your question alone

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Dumb question but what can a Nexus 9K do that Nexus 3K can't? Sure higher throughtput. more this and that. Do you need it?

I remember that Cisco locked certain specific features to N7k. Like RSPAN for example. I'm not 100% sure if this applies to N9k or not.

 

[airsky98]

1 792 000 v4 prefixes is not even 2 full bgp tables

Now full bgp tables is at 9xxK per provider


If you really need and not worry about crashing it, someday...

You can setup route reflector to hold all the routes from all the transit provider and send only 1 copy (of the best route) to this n9k. It will probably work

 

[Kartoff]

1 792 000 v4 prefixes is not even 2 full bgp tables

Now full bgp tables is at 9xxK per provider


If you really need and not worry about crashing it, someday...

You can setup route reflector to hold all the routes from all the transit provider and send only 1 copy (of the best route) to this n9k. It will probably work

Thank you so much for the answer. I will consider your suggestion. Also I'm not sure if every BGP session could contain that much prefixes. At least for now there is BGP sessions to NTT, GTT and few exchanges terminated with existing equipment and neither of them contains more than 200k prefixes. All of them combined have less than 1M.

 

[airsky98]

Probably they have sent you the summaries route (for example , they removed the /24 prefixes and send you the larger prefixes only).

Telia at the moment have 938976
HE at the moment have 962687

This is the full internet table which I just extracted .

 

[sko]

For example we need router that can do 5-10 eBGP sessions to some of the Tier 1 providers IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack. Just this, nothing extra needed.

If you (also) find cisco's BGP implementation and especially configuration somewhat clunky, archaic, inflexible and error-prone, you might want to consider using a more modern implementation, e.g. OpenBGPd.
We are using a redundant pair of OpenBSD VMs for peering and push those routes via BGP to the L3 switches. The switches also peer with our internal route reflectors (also running OpenBGPd but on FreeBSD) and get internal routes from them. BGP configuration on the switches is absolutely minimal, because all aggregation, filtering, route manipulation etc pp happens in OpenBGPd, which has a very readable and flexible syntax (pretty much the same structure as pf.conf) and also works very well in CARP configurations for when you can't get multiple peerings.

 

[Kartoff]

Probably they have sent you the summaries route (for example , they removed the /24 prefixes and send you the larger prefixes only).

Telia at the moment have 938976
HE at the moment have 962687

This is the full internet table which I just extracted .

Yes, they could doing this and also NTT is giving default gateway as well.

If you (also) find cisco's BGP implementation and especially configuration somewhat clunky, archaic, inflexible and error-prone, you might want to consider using a more modern implementation, e.g. OpenBGPd.
We are using a redundant pair of OpenBSD VMs for peering and push those routes via BGP to the L3 switches. The switches also peer with our internal route reflectors (also running OpenBGPd but on FreeBSD) and get internal routes from them. BGP configuration on the switches is absolutely minimal, because all aggregation, filtering, route manipulation etc pp happens in OpenBGPd, which has a very readable and flexible syntax (pretty much the same structure as pf.conf) and also works very well in CARP configurations for when you can't get multiple peerings.

I can't say anything about configuring Cisco because haven't done it yet. I do not have much experience with BGP and so on since I'm mostly hardware guy. I have to find an cheap and easy solution that does the work needed. For example if I find a solution that cost let's say $1000-2000 and can pass 100 Gbps L3 BGP they would be happy. If the price go up above $3-4000 they start sulking LOL In other world we might already had MX204 for $7000 but we don't.
What you have mentioned about OpenBGPd sounds so good and useful in our case and could be a cheaper solution IMO.
We already have deployed couple Mellanox SN2700 and Huawei with 100G ports as transport switches which I did configured myself. We do have Nx100G to some exchanges and tier 1 providers but we can use only a fraction of this because we do not have adequate equipment in between.
We have servers laying around on which I can install FreeBSD but seems I need to figure out myself how this works

-Edit-
As we talk about OpenBGPd, what about FRR then ?