Cisco IOS XRd Data Sheet

Data Sheet

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Updated:April 27, 2023

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Updated:April 27, 2023

Table of Contents

 

 

Product overview

The Cisco IOS® XRd implements the feature set of Cisco IOS XR Software in a Container. XRd complements existing physical Cisco® router platforms that rely on Cisco IOS XR Software, such as Cisco Network Convergence System Routers, Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers, and Cisco 8000 Series Routers. Now, service providers can enhance their operational excellence and offerings based on XRd, by offering new services that needed routing functionality within a smaller footprint. With the advent of other network functions moving to public cloud, XRd provides the option to deploy the routing in a containerized form factor for routing between the network functions running on the cloud and the other functions running on-prem in the data centers as well. The Cisco IOS XRd offers greater agility, improved network efficiency, lower capital and operational expenditures, and the ability to efficiently scale up or down network capacity based on demand.

Main Features of the Cisco IOS XRd Router:

      Routing function that can run on a generic Kubernetes orchestration layer and allows the customers to manage the routing function similar to other applications running in the data center or cloud.

      Based on latest IOSXR7, XRd is lightweight, boots faster, and supports modern OS programmability features (YANG models – native and OC) and model-driven telemetry.

      XRd is derivative of extremely resilient, stable, and feature-rich Cisco IOS XR Software, and with the same northbound and management features as Cisco IOS XR Software, XRd integrates smoothly with existing monitoring, automation, and orchestration systems.

The Cisco IOS XRd can be deployed in the following two ways:

Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane

Figure 1.            

Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane

Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane: Cisco IOS XR Software is an industry-leading, carrier-class operating system supporting highly successful edge and core router platforms from Cisco. This modular OS provides a very high level of availability and its multiprocess and multithread architecture enhances scale and performance by taking advantage of modern multisocket and multicore processors. This supports the latest overlay routing stack of Segment Routing, which Cisco has been pioneering with. Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane is targeted for compute-heavy use cases like Virtual Route Reflector (vRR) and Path Compute Element (PCE). XRd Control Plane provides minimal forwarding capabilities, which is adequate for peering or southbound interfacing.

Cisco IOS XRd vRouter

Figure 2.            

Cisco IOS XRd vRouter

Cisco IOS XRd vRouter (Control Plane + virtual forwarder): The virtual forwarder uses the feature and forwarding code developed for Cisco NPU-based physical platforms and the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). However, it is optimized specifically for general-purpose CPU environments. It uses Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) and Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instructions for improved software-based classification. Memory access is asynchronous for parallel feature processing, and data structures are optimized for best utilization of the cache. In addition, batched packet delivery and processing and high-speed load balancing across the feature execution process help provide a very high-performance data plane, with the features service providers require. Cisco IOS XRd vRouter can be deployed with minimal footprint (~2 vCPUs) and is targeted for the use cases where there is a shortage of compute resources.

Table 1.        Deployment model and benefits

Feature

Benefit

Traditionally a service provider deployed physical routing devices as route reflectors. A route reflector application makes intensive use of the Control Plane and is low on data plane usage. This leads to suboptimal usage of the capacity provided by the physical router.

Virtual route reflector

  Convergence of many route reflectors into a few virtual route reflectors using Cisco IOS XRd
  Significant reduction of the physical footprint, power, cooling, and cabling overhead associated with maintaining physical route reflector systems

Path Compute Element (PCE) is another compute-intensive function and warrants only minimal data plane capabilities, which doesn’t need a dedicated physical router for this functionality. This is offered under the Cisco Network Controller (CNC) umbrella and inherently will use the XRd in the PCE role.

Path Computation Element

  Optimal utilization of the compute for the PCE functionality, which can run in centralized on-prem or public cloud, for managing the Segment Routing topology across the network
  Significant reduction of physical footprint, power, cooling, and cabling overhead associated with maintaining physical PCE systems

With 5G deployments taking compute deployments to the Far Edge, XRd can be deployed along with Virtual Distributed Unit (vDU) on the compute, to route the mobile traffic toward the aggregation.

Virtual Cell Site Router

  vDU is very compute intensive, and XRd fulfills the customer requirement to have the routing functionality on the same compute, consuming less CPU cores.
  For cell sites, where massive MIMO isn’t needed, XRd offers savings of OpEx and physical footprint by deploying a single RU COTS server at the mid-haul site.

Service providers are partnering with hyperscalers to run the critical network functions as work loads on the public cloud, to attain CapEx savings and also embrace the agility and experience of the hyperscalers managing the virtualization at massive scale. XRd can be deployed as the routing gateway for the Network Functions running in the public cloud, enabling the overlay routing between the transport network and the NFs.

Cloud Router

  Cisco XRd as a cloud router provides the overlay routing solution on public cloud environments, enabling the customers to continue to reuse the existing orchestration and assurance systems for the Network Functions deployed on the cloud, providing seamless XR experience.

A service provider needs to provide Layer 3 Provider/Business Edge functionality at a location that has low throughput. They already have their service and offerings based on physical Cisco ASR 9000 or NCS devices and want to offer the same services at the low-throughput locations. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) providers who offer scalable private connectivity for customers can utilize XRd for instantiating small form factor Edge routers at each of their POPs.

Virtual provider edge

  Consistent architecture with widely used ASR 9000 and NCS Series platforms
  Rich set of networking experiences based on Cisco IOS XR Software
  Reduced Capital Expenditures (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx) realized by using simplified and consumption-based models

Licensing

The Cisco IOS XRd offers a simplified subscription-based licensing scheme, based on:

      Per instance for the Control Plane

      Throughput utilization for the vRouter

The licensing structure allows service providers to pay for what they consume. Licenses are activated through Cisco Smart Software Licensing. Further details about Cisco Smart Software Licensing are available at www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/abt_sw.html.

Product specifications

Table 2 lists specifications for the Cisco IOS XRd Router.

Table 2.        Cisco IOS XRd specifications

Parameter

Requirement

XRd Control Plane Host

CPU

x86-64 CPU with at least 2 cores

RAM

4 GB

Linux kernel

Version 4 and later

Note: The Linux kernel must install the dummy and nf_tables modules.

Linux cgroups

Version 1

Note: Support for unified hierarchy cgroups is not available.

XRd Control Plane instance

CPU

1 core

RAM

2 GB

inotify user instances and watches

4000

XRd Control Plane on AWS EC2 instance

Instance type

m5.2xlarge

Number of threads per processor core

1

Minimum disk size

8 GB

Note: A XRd instance requires the minimum disk size of 8 GB, but there may be demand for additional disk space depending on how the node handles core files.

Operating system

Amazon Linux 2 with EKS Optimizations

Kernel settings

4000 inotify user instances and watches per XRd instance

XRd vRouter host

CPU

x86-64 CPU with at least 4 cores

CPU instruction set

  ssse3
  sse4.1
  sse4.2

Linux kernel

Version 4 and later

Note: The Linux kernel must install the dummy and nf_tables modules.

Linux cgroups

Version 1

Note: Support for unified hierarchy cgroups is not available.

Other modules required

vfio-pci or ugb_io

XRd vRouter instance

CPU

At least 2 isolated CPUs

RAM

5 GB

Hugepages

3 GB

Note: The XRd vRouter instance must enable Hugepage support with 1GB hugepage size.

inotify user instances and watches

4000

XRd vRouter on Amazon EC2 Instance

Instance types

  m5.24xlarge
  m5n.24xlarge

Number of threads per processor core

1

Minimum disk size

8 GB

Note: An XRd instance requires the minimum disk size of 8 GB, but there may be demand for additional disk space depending on how the node handles core files.

Operating system

Amazon Linux 2 with EKS Optimizations

Kernel settings

  4000 inotify user instances and watches per XRd instance
  CPU isolation settings for the required XRd deployments

Additional kernel modules

  uio (from Amazon Linux 2)
  igb_uio from DPDK 19.11.12, with write combine mode enabled

Hugepages

3 GB

Note: The XRd vRouter instance must enable Hugepage support with 1GB hugepage size.

Other Environments:

Table 3.        Other supported environments

Environment

Description

Docker

Docker version 18 or later with permission to run Docker containers

Vanilla Kubernetes

1.22

Warranty information

Warranty information is available on Cisco.com at the Product Warranties page.

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