Routing

We are building a network with 30 ACX routers in a ring configuration running evpn with ISIS on the underlay and anycast gateways on our voice, video and data servers. 

Coming from a Cisco environment, we are running the route reflectors on 3 routers within the network and the remaining were route reflector clients.  This was a Cisco recommendation at the time, I am not sure if it would still be their recommendation or not.

I am looking for thoughts and input on using route reflector appliance, running a route reflector on the ACX platform, or other recommendations. 

Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used? 
Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?
Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
Thank you in advance for thoughts or feedback.

1. Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used?
   1. We re-use MXs as our route reflectors. MX204s could be a good lower end cost RR if you already had them.
   2. You can achieve the same with a sufficiently thought through server running one of the popular routing platforms.
2. Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?'.
   1. Probably not the greatest idea in general but depends on your route scale I suppose
   2. ACXs aren't generally known for being huge route table number crunchers. You may be able to fit a full table in, but how about 7? As the route reflector, that may be important or may not be depending on your scale.
3. Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
   
   1. We have 1 route reflector cluster of two routers for about 50 MXs / PTXs

We are building a network with 30 ACX routers in a ring configuration running evpn with ISIS on the underlay and anycast gateways on our voice, video and data servers. 

Coming from a Cisco environment, we are running the route reflectors on 3 routers within the network and the remaining were route reflector clients.  This was a Cisco recommendation at the time, I am not sure if it would still be their recommendation or not.

I am looking for thoughts and input on using route reflector appliance, running a route reflector on the ACX platform, or other recommendations. 

Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used? 
Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?
Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
Thank you in advance for thoughts or feedback.

Another good option for route reflector (if you have servers available) is to use vRR or cRPD for this purpose. The big benefit of this is that you can allocate a server with a beefy CPU and memory resources for much quick processing and convergence times. 

Most routers, while great at forwarding and such, are of course not necessarily using the top of the line in CPU or RAM, which are the components you'd need to process loads of routes and do route convergence. As a RR does not need to be in the path of the actual traffic (it's just sharing routes, not actually routing itself), it can run perfectly on a server, which then has better/more/faster memory and CPU, but of course not the actual traffic forwarding capacity.

I've seen excellent graphs (by Juniper, admittedly) that show a significant improvement in convergence times when using virtualized route reflectors (either using vRR or cRPD, depending on whether you prefer a VM or a container solution).

To be fair, I do not have handson experience with these myself, so I can't vouch for these results, but the people I've spoken to so far that do use such solutions are pretty enthusiastic about the performance. Additional benefits of such a solution would be that you can easily deploy these in a distributed manner, while not necessarily taking up more rack space or such (assuming you have servers available in your infra to host these on).

1. Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used?
   1. We re-use MXs as our route reflectors. MX204s could be a good lower end cost RR if you already had them.
   2. You can achieve the same with a sufficiently thought through server running one of the popular routing platforms.
2. Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?'.
   1. Probably not the greatest idea in general but depends on your route scale I suppose
   2. ACXs aren't generally known for being huge route table number crunchers. You may be able to fit a full table in, but how about 7? As the route reflector, that may be important or may not be depending on your scale.
3. Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
   
   1. We have 1 route reflector cluster of two routers for about 50 MXs / PTXs

We are building a network with 30 ACX routers in a ring configuration running evpn with ISIS on the underlay and anycast gateways on our voice, video and data servers. 

Coming from a Cisco environment, we are running the route reflectors on 3 routers within the network and the remaining were route reflector clients.  This was a Cisco recommendation at the time, I am not sure if it would still be their recommendation or not.

I am looking for thoughts and input on using route reflector appliance, running a route reflector on the ACX platform, or other recommendations. 

Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used? 
Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?
Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
Thank you in advance for thoughts or feedback.

1. Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used?
   1. We re-use MXs as our route reflectors. MX204s could be a good lower end cost RR if you already had them.
   2. You can achieve the same with a sufficiently thought through server running one of the popular routing platforms.
2. Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?'.
   1. Probably not the greatest idea in general but depends on your route scale I suppose
   2. ACXs aren't generally known for being huge route table number crunchers. You may be able to fit a full table in, but how about 7? As the route reflector, that may be important or may not be depending on your scale.
3. Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
   
   1. We have 1 route reflector cluster of two routers for about 50 MXs / PTXs

We are building a network with 30 ACX routers in a ring configuration running evpn with ISIS on the underlay and anycast gateways on our voice, video and data servers. 

Coming from a Cisco environment, we are running the route reflectors on 3 routers within the network and the remaining were route reflector clients.  This was a Cisco recommendation at the time, I am not sure if it would still be their recommendation or not.

I am looking for thoughts and input on using route reflector appliance, running a route reflector on the ACX platform, or other recommendations. 

Are separate route reflector appliances best practice or is there alternative solutions you have used? 
Has anyone run the router reflector on the ACX and at what scale?
Do you run them in an N+1 or N+2 layout?
Thank you in advance for thoughts or feedback.