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CLEAR CHOICE TEST: CISCO CLOUD SERVICES ROUTER (CSR)
CSR 1000V works flawlessly, but beware of hardware requirements, licensing issues
THE CISCO CSR lOOOV router is designed for enterprise network managers who want to have a little piece of their Cisco infrastructure in the cloud.
Whether that's for firewalling, VPN or dynamic routing the idea is that a virtual router gives the network manager the flexibility to enforce policy, connect or provide high availability using familiar Cisco tools and technologies.
We tested the CSR 1000 V, a full-featured IOS XE router running the 3.8S release of XE in a VMware-compatible virtual machine. Does it work? Yes, in fact, it works just fine. It works great, actually.
In our functional testing, the CSR 1000V met the requirements we'd expect for this type of environment. We tried bringing up VPN connections, defining firewall and NAT rules, and running both OSPF and BGP routing protocols. We set up two CSR 1000V virtual machines on two different hosts, and used HSRP to fail over between them. We exercised both IPv4 and IPv6, and we tested management with Cisco's command line, as well as SNMP monitoring and remote syslog logging.
The version of the CSR 1000V we tested is only supported on VMware's ESXi 5 infrastructure. We looked at an early release version; Cisco told us the virtual appliance should be available to all customers around March. At that time, IOS XE will be upgraded to v3.9.
We started out...