“We were familiar with the capabilities of the Juniper routers acting as BGP route reflectors (RRs), and once we’d seen the virtual RR in the lab, we decided it was exactly what we needed in order to cut costs and speed up our deployment times. Cypress Consulting helped us with the design and implementation of the vRR as well the routing design that vRRs required. Cypress enabled us to access all the features and the stability of the Junos operating system in a state-of-the-art virtual package.”

Business Challenge

Customer demanded a new cost effective, scalable solution to scale their existing physical route reflectors running Junos operating system.

Technology Solution

Cypress Consulting examined multiple available control plane only solutions in the market on behalf of the customer and recommended Juniper’s vRR solution.

The virtual Route Reflector (vRR) feature allowed the client to implement route reflector capability using a general purpose virtual machine that could be run on a 64-bit Intel-based blade server or appliance. Because a route reflector works in the control plane, it could run completely in a virtualized environment. A virtual route reflector on an Intel-based blade server or appliance works the same as a route reflector on a router, providing a scalable alternative to full mesh internal BGP peering. The vRR solution is very lightweight and can be deployed in a very little memory space. Since the solution is completely virtual based on KVM virtualization, the deployment and scaling of the solution was fully automated.

Business Results

Customer reports the following results as a direct result of the successful implementation of the vRR project:

– Scalability: By implementing the vRR solution, customer gained scalability improvements and was able to implement virtual route reflectors at multiple locations in the network quickly and in a cost effective manner.

– Faster and more flexible deployment: Through installing the vRR feature on an Intel servers and by using open source tools customer reduced software and router maintenance costs.

– Space savings: Hardware-based route reflectors required central office space. The vRR was enabled on an existing server infrastructure in the Telco’s data centers, which saved space as well as reducing power and cooling costs.