
jtrotz at gmail
Jun 23, 2012, 2:50 PM
Post #1 of 1
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Enabling IPv6 on Cisco 6500 breaks IPv4 Internet connectivity.
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Final update: After much testing in the lab and working with Cisco TAC (almost no help), I have reached a conclusion about the problem - its a hardware limitation. Enabling IPV6 routing on a 6500 (with XL cards) and a full Internet routing table in a VRF exceeds the limits of SP processing, The SP goes to 99% utilization reconfiguring something but eventually recovers. In the lab this took almost 5 minutes! In real life with many 10Gb interfaces active - who knows!! The problem is that the router still passes enough traffic that EIGRP and BGP stay up, but all user traffic is "black hole'd" due to the 1-10kbs effective throughput. It looks like this may be a one time event, but neither Cisco TAC or the BU could say for sure this wouldn't happen again under some kind of BGP flap of VRF reconfig. Our TCAM limit is 512K ipV4 routes now and we have 409K routes today. We will probably resort to filtering down the BGP learned routes to 100-200K and then default for everything else to our Internet routers and then go shopping for a new router. The problem isn't noticeable until we have more than about 250K routes. There was no interest in redesigning the network to not use VRFs for the Internet table. Once IPV6 is enabled and all is stable we will probably go shopping for new routers. Thanks again for everyone's suggestions, it helped us figure out the root cause.
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