Cisco ASR 1001 routers in a multi VRF enterprise-wide WAN
June 07, 2019
Cisco ASR 1001 routers in a multi VRF enterprise-wide WAN
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 1000)
We use the ASR routers at our power plant locations as the core of the WAN network running multiple VRF instances. The VRF instances provide separation of corporate and plant controls traffic running over our private 10G WAN infrastructure.
- The routers have been very reliable with little to no down time.
- They have provided the throughput needed by the organization.
- Management of the routers and their ability to send advanced net-flow data have greatly increased our understanding of network performance and how applications are performing on the network.
- Licensing on the routers is more complicated than it needs to be. We have the ASR routers along with ISR routers both have the license of the advanced service, however, on the ISR routers that license did not include the app-X feature needed to send the application specific net-flow data we wanted. It would be better if Cisco was consistence with the features included with licenses.
- Some software patches are quite involved as there is a boot loaded and IOS that must be upgraded.
- We have started the journey into a software-defined network SD-Access and SD-WAN. These routers have served the organization in traditional network deployment and are able to transition over to SD-WAN without any increased spend.
Cisco has a larger market share than Juniper in the router markets. Because of that, there are more certified Cisco service engineers and more online support resources compared with Juniper for troubleshooting hardware issues. The rest of our LAN infrastructure was already Cisco making the support footprint for the routers lower with Cisco than Juniper.