Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Overview

The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router is based on Cisco IOS XR software, so it inherits and shares the wide breadth of routing functionality available on other IOS XR platforms. The IOS XR features available on the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router are discussed in Supported Cisco IOS XR Technologies section.

When the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router virtual IOS XR software is deployed as a VM, the Cisco IOS XR software functions just as if it were deployed on a traditional Cisco IOS XR hardware platform. The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router combines Route Processor, Line Card, and virtualized forwarding capabilities into a single, centralized forwarding instance. The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router has a fully featured, high speed virtual x86 data plane.

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router supports the same look and feel as Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers and North-bound APIs. Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router does not support hardware specific configurations. The configuration commands for control plane and data plane features follow the same syntax as the Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers. See Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers command references for more information on configuration commands.

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Licensing Model

The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router supports activation using Cisco Smart Licensing. By default the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router (without license) is rate limited to 200 Kbps.

For more information on licensing model supported on Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router, see the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Smart Licensing chapter in the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Installation and Configuration Guide.

See Cisco Smart Software Licensing Overview for more information on Cisco Smart Licensing.

License Ordering Information

The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router offers a flexible licensing scheme, with multiple tiers to choose from, such as Scale, and Throughput. This table lists details of Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router's pool of software licenses or entitlements, arranged according to licensing PIDs.


Note

The XRv9000 router only consumes and reports VPE licenses. VRR licenses are not consumed or reported.
Table 1. Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router UCS M5 Based vRR Appliance PIDS

License PID

Description

R-XRV9000-66-RR

Cisco IOS XRV 9000 software, VRR profile

S-XRV-ROUTE-T4

Preloaded Software Image: IOS XRv 9000 vRR scale upgrade license from 20M up to 70M

XRV9000-APLN-ROUT

IOS XRv 9000 M5 Appliance with preloaded IOS XR functionality with 20 million route scale

Supported MIBs

The following MIBs are supported in this release:

  • ENTITY-MIB

  • ENTITY-STATE-MIB

  • CISCO-ENTITY-ASSET-MIB

  • BGP4-MIB

  • CISCO-AAA-SERVER-MIB

  • CISCO-ACL-MIB

  • CISCO-BGP4-MIB

  • CISCO-BULK-FILE-MIB

  • CISCO-CDP-MIB

  • CISCO-CLASS-BASED-QOS-MIB

  • CISCO-CONFIG-COPY-MIB

  • CISCO-CONFIG-MAN-MIB

  • CISCO-CONTEXT-MAPPING-MIB

  • CISCO-FTP-CLIENT-MIB

  • CISCO-IF-EXTENSION-MIB

  • CISCO-PING-MIB

  • CISCO-PROCESS-MIB

  • CISCO-SYSLOG-MIB

  • CISCO-SYSTEM-MIB

  • CISCO-TCP-MIB

  • CISCO-VLAN-IFTABLE-RELATIONSHIP-MIB

  • ETHERLIKE-MIB

  • EVENT-MIB

  • EXPRESSION-MIB

  • IETF-TCP-MIB

  • IETF-UDP-MIB

  • IF-MIB

  • IP-FORWARD-MIB

  • IP-MIB

  • IPV6-MIB

  • IPV6-FORWARD-MIB

  • ISIS-MIB

  • MPLS-L3VPN-STD-MIB

  • MPLS-LDP-GENERIC-STD-MIB

  • MPLS-LDP-STD-MIB

  • MPLS-LSR-STD-MI

  • NOTIFICATION-LOG-MIB

  • OSPF-MIB

  • OSPF-TRAP-MIB

  • OSPFV3-MIB

  • RFC1213-MIB

  • RFC2011-MIB

  • RFC2465-MIB

  • SNMP-COMMUNITY-MIB

  • SNMP-FRAMEWORK-MIB

  • SNMP-NOTIFICATION-MIB

  • SNMP-TARGET-MIB

  • SNMP-USB-MIB

  • SNMPv2-MIB

  • SNMP-VACM-MIB

  • TCP-MIB

  • UDP-MIB

  • CISCO-IETF-BFD-MIB

  • CISCO-IP-TAP-MIB

  • CISCO-TAP2-MIB

  • RADIUS-ACC-CLIENT-MIB

  • RADIUS-AUTH-CLIENT-MIB

  • SNMP-TARGET-MIB

New Software Features Supported in Release

  • Application Hosting—Application hosting gives administrators a platform for leveraging their own tools and utilities. Cisco IOS XR 6.0 supports third-party off-the-shelf applications built using Linux tool chains. Users can run custom applications cross-compiled with the software development kit that Cisco provides. Application hosting is offered in two variants: Native and Container.

    Cisco IOS XR uses a 64-bit Linux-based operating system that simplifies the integration of applications, configuration management tools, and industry-standard zero touch provisioning mechanisms to meet the DevOps style workflows for service providers.

  • BFD over Logical Bundle (BLB)—BLB is a multipath (MP) single-hop session. BLB requires limited knowledge of the bundle interfaces on which the sessions run; this is because BFD treats the bundle as one big pipe. To function, BLB requires only information about IP addresses, interface types, and caps on bundle interfaces. Information such as list of bundle members, member states, and configured minimum or maximum bundle links are not required.

  • Link Bundle or Link Aggregation Group (LAG)—A link bundle is a group of one or more ports that are aggregated together and treated as a single link. Each bundle has a single MAC, a single IP address, and a single configuration set (such as ACLs). Since XRv 9000 is a virtual platform, you must configure mac address on each bundle main interface. Use lacp system mac command in global configuration mode and mac address command in interface configuration mode to configure mac address to bundle main interface. Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) for virtual E1000, VirtIO, and VMXNET3 is not supported.


    Note

    Cisco IOS XRv 9000 supports only Layer 3 link bundle.

  • Network Service Header (NSH)—Network Service Header is the Service Function Chaining (SFC) encapsulation required to support the SFC Architecture (defined in RFC7665). The NSH is inserted onto ingress encapsulated packets or frames to realize service function paths. NSH also provides a mechanism for metadata exchange along the instantiated service path.


    Note

    • A service classifier supports only IPv4 ACL 5-tuple based packet classification.

    • The proxy function is not supported in this release.

  • Multisocket Dataplane—The Cisco IOS XRv 9000 router supports a dataplane that is located on one or two sockets.

  • Platform Automated Monitoring—Platform Automated Monitoring (PAM) is a system monitoring tool integrated into Cisco IOS XR software image to monitor issues such as process crash, memory leak, CPU hog, tracebacks, syslog and disk usage. When PAM tool detects any of these system issues, it collects the required data to troubleshoot the issue, and generates a syslog message stating the issue. The auto-collected troubleshooting information is then stored in a separate file located at the harddisk:. The files are located at harddisk:/cisco_support/ or at /misc/disk1/cisco_support. PAM is enabled by default on all Cisco IOS XR 64 bit platforms.

For documentation reference for above features, see Supported Cisco IOS XR Technologies section.

System Requirements

Hypervisors

A hypervisor enables multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host machine. While each operating system appears to have the dedicated use of the host's processor, memory, and other resources; the hypervisor controls and allocates only needed resources to each operating system and ensures that the operating systems (VMs) do not disrupt each other.

Installation of the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router is supported on selected Type 1 (native, bare metal) hypervisors. Installation is not supported on Type 2 (hosted) hypervisors, such as VMware Fusion, VMware Player, or Virtual Box. The following table lists release specific supported hypervisor versions.

Table 2. Support Matrix for Hypervisor Versions

Cisco IOS XR Version

VMWare ESXi

Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM)

version 6.5, 6.7, and later

Linux KVM based on

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, and 8.0

  • Ubuntu 14.04.03 LTS

  • CentOS 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7

  • Openstack 10

Virtual Machines

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router virtual machines must meet the following requirements:

Table 3. VM Requirement for VMware Environment

Parameters

Supported

VMware ESXi

Version 6.5, 6.7, 7.0 and later

Virtual CPU cores

1 socket with a minimum of 2 cores

Note

 

For production environment minimum of 4 cores is recommended.

Virtual Machine memory size

Virtual Machine hard disk size

Virtual Interfaces

E1000

VMXNET3 for traffic interfaces only

Physical NICs

For pass-through:

  • Intel i350 Quad Port 1Gb Adapter

  • Intel Dual Port 10 GbE Ethernet X520 Server Adapter

  • Intel 4 port 10GE Fortville

    Note

     

    PCI passthrough only. SRIOV is not supported.

Note

 

  • Intel Forville has a lower forwarding capability (for high throughput applications in vPE profiles) when compared with Intel 82599 10GE Controller.

Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1225

Note

 

If you are configuring LLDP on Cisco IOS XRv 9000, then you must first disable LLDP in the Cisco UCS VIC 1225 via Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC).

Number of interfaces

Minimum of 4 NICs where:

  • 1 for management

  • 2 are reserved

  • 1 for traffic

Maximum of 11 NICs where:

  • 1 for management

  • 2 are reserved

  • 8 for traffic

Default video, SCSI controller set

Required

SCSI controller not required for IDE disk.

Virtual CD/DVD drive installed

Virtual CD/DVD is required when installing the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router on the VM using ISO template.

IDE hard disk

Single IDE hard disk

Note

 

Multiple hard disk drives on a VM are not supported.


Note

The maximum traffic performance with pass-through NIC interfaces in ESXi is lower than the performance that can be achieved in KVM environments. This is because it is not possible to configure 1G huge-pages in the ESXi hypervisor (as of VMware ESXi 6.0).

Table 4. VM Requirement for KVM Environment

Parameters

Supported

KVM versions

  • Linux KVM based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4

  • Ubuntu 14.04.03 LTS Server 64 Bits

  • Openstack Release 5 (Icehouse), Openstack Juno/Icehouse (RHEL 7), Kilo (RHEL 7.1), Liberty (RHEL 7.2), Openstack 10 (Newton)

  • CentOS 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7

Virtual CPU cores

1 socket with minimum of 2 cores.

Virtual Machine memory size

Virtual Machine hard disk size

Virtual Interfaces

E1000, VirtIO and

VMXNET3 for traffic interfaces only

Physical NICs

For pass-through:

  • Intel i350 Quad Port 1Gb Adapter

  • Intel Dual Port 10 GbE Ethernet X520 Server Adapter

  • Intel 4 port 10GE Fortville

    Note

     

    PCI passthrough only. SRIOV is not support.

Note

 

  • Intel Forville has a lower forwarding capability (for high throughput applications in vPE profiles) when compared with Intel 82599 10GE Controller.

Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1225

Note

 

If you are configuring LLDP on Cisco IOS XRv 9000, then you must first disable LLDP in the Cisco UCS VIC 1225 via Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC).

Number of interfaces

Minimum of 4 NICs where:

  • 1 is for management

  • 2 are reserved

  • 1 is for traffic

Maximum of 11 NICs where:

  • 1 is for management

  • 2 are reserved

  • 8 is for traffic

Virtual CD/DVD drive installed

Virtual CD/DVD drive is required for ISO installation


Note

In the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router, some CPU cores are dedicated to the control plane while others are dedicated to the data plane. Each data plane's core runs a single thread that performs packet forwarding. To achieve maximum performance, these threads constantly look for data packets to process. As a result, the OS records that these cores run at 100% utilization. This is expected behavior and not an indication that packet forwarding has reached its threshold limit.

Server

The server must support:

  • Intel Westmere or later CPU versions with clock frequency of 2.0GHz for instances with Gigabit or paravirtualized interfaces

  • Intel Ivy Bridge or later CPU versions for instances with 10Gb or higher interfaces

  • Intel CPU must support the sse4_2 capability flag. This can be checked in KVM by looking for the sse4_2 flag in the flags section of /proc/cpuinfo. For example:
    cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep sse4_2
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon nopl xtopology tsc_reliable nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq vmx ssse3 fma cx16 pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm ida arat epb pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi ept vpid fsgsbase smep

Note
To use passthrough interfaces in KVM, you must set the option intel_iommu=on command in the grub configuration.

Supported Cisco IOS XR Technologies

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router supports selected Cisco IOS XR technologies.

This table lists the major Cisco IOS XR technologies Cisco IOS XRv 9000 supports. Not all features in a given technology may be supported. To verify support for specific features, use Cisco Feature Navigator.

Table 5. Cisco IOS XR Technologies Supported on the Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router

Feature

See the Following Documentation

Introduced in Release

  • 6PE, 6VPE

Release 5.4.0

  • Bi-directional Policing and Marking

Release 5.4.0

  • Bi-directional Forwarding Detection

Release 5.4.0

Customize Installation using Golden ISO

Customize Installation using Golden ISO

 Release 7.3.1

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Deployment on AWS

Release 6.3.1

Create User Profiles and Assign Privileges

System Setup and Software Installation Guide for Cisco ASR 9000 Series Routers

Release 7.1.1

  • Early Fast Discard

Release 5.4.0

  • IPv4 Routing

  • IPv6 Routing

  • OSPF

  • ISIS

Release 5.4.0

  • IPv4 and IPv6 ACL

Release 5.4.0

  • IPv4 L3VPN

  • 6PE, 6VPE

Release 5.4.0

  • Lawful Intercept

Release 5.4.0

  • LDP

Release 5.4.0

  • LPTS

Release 5.4.0

  • MPLS

Release 5.4.0

  • MP-BGP, EBGP PE-CE

Release 5.4.0

  • Netconf Yang support

Release 5.4.0

  • Smart Licensing

Release 5.4.0

  • SNMP support

Release 5.4.0

  • Strict Unicast IPv4 and IPv6 Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF)

Release 5.4.0

  • The Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP)

Release 6.0.1

gNMI Bundling of Telemetry Updates

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Installation and Configuration Guide

Release 7.8.1

ORR Support for FlexAlgo

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Installation and Configuration Guide

Release 7.5.1

Generic Route Encapsulation using IPv6

MPLS Layer 3 VPN Configuration Guide

Release 7.3.3

  • Running High Availability (HA) redundancy application for AWS

  • QoS on IPv4 Release GRE Tunnels

  • Increase in BFD scale limit and BFD sessions

Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Router Installation and Configuration Guide

Release 7.3.3

  • Enhanced Networking Features with Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) on Amazon EC2 M5 Instances

  • Updated DPDK Driver Version

  • Enhanced router performance and scales

  • ACL Based Forwarding (ABF)

  • Redirect IPV4 and IPv6 traffic using PBR

  • Support for IPv6 over SR-MPLS through a GRE Tunnel towards an IPv6 Next Hop device

  • BFD on GRE Tunnel Interface

Release Notes for Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Routers, IOS XR Release 7.3.3

Release 7.3.3

  • SR-PCE: Single PCE scale enhancement

  • SR-PCE: Stateful North-Bound API for Tree-SID

Release Notes for Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Routers, IOS XR Release 7.5.1

Release 7.5.1

Caveats

Caveats describe unexpected behavior in Cisco IOS XR Software release.

Related Documentation

Production Software Maintenance Updates (SMUs)

A production SMU is a SMU that is formally requested, developed, tested, and released. Production SMUs are intended for use in a live network environment and are formally supported by the Cisco TAC and the relevant development teams. Software bugs identified through software recommendations or Bug Search Tools are not a basis for production SMU requests.

For information on production SMU types, refer the Production SMU Types section of the IOS XR Software Maintenance Updates (SMUs) guide.

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