Release Notes for Cisco IOS XRd, IOS XR Release 7.7.1

XRd is a powerful IOS XR virtual platform that supports a wide variety of technology roles such as virtual route reflector (vRR), virtual cell-site router (vCSR), and virtual provider-edge (vPE). It is available in a containerized form-factor enabling both standalone and Kubernetes-based containerized network deployments.

Cisco IOS XRd Overview

XRd is the latest virtual platform from Cisco that brings the highly scalable, feature-rich, and reliable IOS-XR operating system to containerized network deployments. With XR control plane pedigree shared with the likes of Cisco 8000 and data plane capabilities that are derived from the powerful XRv9000, XRd brings the best of both worlds - enabling high scale control plane use cases such as virtual route-reflector (vRR) and high throughput requirements in virtual provider edge (vPE) use cases.

XRd is available in two formats:

  • XRd Control Plane

  • XRd vRouter

Cisco IOS XRd Licensing Model

The Cisco IOS XRd platform offers two types of licensing schemes. This table lists details of Cisco IOS XRd Router's software licenses or entitlements, arranged according to licensing PIDs.

The Cisco IOS XRd instances are pre-loaded with an evaluation license valid for 90 days. For licenses post the evaluation period, you can purchase the XRd licenses using Cisco Smart Licensing.

Table 1. Cisco IOS XRd Licensing PIDs

PIDs

Description

XRD-VR-CP

XRd Control Plane

  • XRD-VR-CP-DP-ESS

  • XRD-VR-CP-DP-ADN

  • XRD-VR-CP-DP-ADV

XRd vRouter

What's New in Cisco IOS XR Release 7.7.1

Software Features Introduced

The following user scenarios are supported with this release:

User Scenarios Deployment

vPE

  • Standalone Docker

  • OpenShift based K8s

vRR

  • Standalone Docker

  • OpenShift based K8s

vCSR

VMware Tanzu based K8s

Simulation

  • Manual Testing

  • Automation

  • CI/CD Workflows

Cisco is continuously enhancing the product with every release and this section lists key features. It also includes links to detailed documentation, where available.

Cisco IOS XRd supports majority of the Cisco IOS XR technologies.The following sections detail the feature set per user scenarios:

vRR

  • ORR for IPv6 Unicast AF for the single ISIS topology case

Host Requirements

This section details the host requirements for both XRd Control Plane and XRd vRouter:

Table 2. XRd Control Plane
Parameter Requirement

XRd Control Plane Host

CPU

x86-64 CPU with at least 2 cores

RAM

4 GB

Linux kernel

Version 4 and above

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 on the host

CPU

1 core

RAM

2 GB

Inotify user instances and watches

2000

Table 3. XRd vRouter
Parameter Requirement

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 above

Note 

The Linux kernel must install the dummy, vfio-pci or igb_uio, and nf_tables modules.

Linux cgroups

version 1

Note 

Support for unified hierarchy cgroups is not available.

XRd vRouter instance on the host

CPU

2 isolated

RAM

5 GB

Hugepages

3 GB

Note 

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

Inotify user instances and watches

2000


Note

For using Docker to run the containers, you need Docker version 18 or above with permission to run Docker containers.