How many OSPF Processes does a Cat6500 w/ Sup720 support?

[kfischbach]

Hi,

we've to build many vrf's and have to run

OSPF on each of these.

My question is, how many OSPF Processes does a Cat6500 w/ Sup720 can support?

regards

kf

[Harold Ritter · Accepted solution]

Starting with 12.2(18)SXE, there is no more a hard limit on the number of OSPF processes you can configure for VRF purposes.

Hope this helps,

[ekiriakos]

Hi Harold,

Does this mean that the limit of 32 PDB's no longer apply?

Is this the case for other IOS verions such as 12.0S?

Thanks

E.

[Harold Ritter]

Correct, given you have the right level of code.

This same feature has been integrated in 12.0(27)S.

Hope this helps,

[ekiriakos]

Harold,

Thanks for the clarification. I hope you don't mind one more question. I have looked it up..http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios123/123newft/123t/123t_4/gtospfvf.htm

but it is not clear whether multiple vrfs can share the same routing process through the routing context mechanism. If this is not supported yet, then I wonder how scalable this is, and in particular whether service providers will view this as a viable feature considering the demand on resources on a PE router to run multiple (according to the document, depending on platform, up to 10,000!) ospf processes?

Regards,

E.

[Harold Ritter]

The documentation might be a bit confusing. The multiple VRF instances do not share the same OSPF process. A separate OSPF process is rather used for each VRF instance. The scalability of this is simply limited by the resources available on the PE. This feature just removes a hard limitation that was preventing providers to use OSPF altogether as a PE-CE routing protocol.

In my view, running BGP or static routes between the PE and the CE is the best way to scale.

Hope this helps,