Virtual Service Router - An introduction

Today you can get nearly everything as a virtual appliance. So even a router. Usually virtual router appliances are used for the same purposes as physical router: Connecting different networks. A router is nothing more then a piece of hardware and software. Due to this fact a router can be easily deployed as a virtual appliance. So where do you find router typically? In you datacenter? Yes, but in a datacenter you will deal typically with layer-3 switches rather than a classical router. In you WAN? That’s much warmer. Think of all the CE router in the branch offices, or the router that is running at a SMB customer. Or the small linux VM with IPtables which secures a special VM on your hypervisor. Or public cloud deployments. But what’s the benefit of a virtual router?

  • You can get rid of the hardware and let the router run on your standard x86 server with your favorite hypervisor
  • You can speed up the deployment, because it’s software
  • You can dynamically allocate resources if needed and profit from features that you hypervisor provides
  • You save power and rack space

Two examples for virtual service router

I’d like to highlight two products, one from HP and one from Cisco. HP offers the HP VSR1000 Virtual Services Router, Cisco the Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V. Don’t make the mistake and confuse the CSR100V with the Nexus 1000V! The Nexus 1000V is a Distributed Switch which replaces the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch, the CSR1000V is a virtual router appliance.

Both virtual service router run the same OS as their physical counter parts. The HP VSR1000 is running Comware 7, the CSR100V is running IOS XE. So both provides functionality similar to the physical counter parts. To name just a few features that both products provide:

  • Layer 3 Routing (static routing and routing protocols like RIP, OSPF, BGP, IS-IS)
  • Layer 3 Services (NAT, DHCP)
  • Security (Firewall, ACLs)
  • High Availability/ Resiliency (VRRP, BFD)
  • VPN/ WAN (IPsec, MPLS)
  • QoS

The features are framed by management functions. You can manage those virtual service routers like a physical router. These eases the administration and is a great benefit. Your networking guys don’t have to learn another command line syntax. They can manage a virtual service router like a physical router.

I want to play with it!

No problem! Just download the appliances and give it a try. Both vendors offer free downloads. Follow this link to download the HP VSR1000. You need a HP Passport account to download the appliance. The demo versionis performance limited, but it has no expiration date and it’s fully featured. A 60 days trial license is available. With this license there’s no performance limitation. You can run the VSR1000 on VMware ESXi 4.1, 5.0, and 5.1. If you want to run it on Linux KVM you have to use Linux kernel version 2.6.25. Cisco also provides a free trial version of their CSR1000V. You need a Cisco.com account to download the appliance. The free demo is valid for 60 days and it’s fully featured with a throughput of 50 Mbps. After the trial period you have to purchase a license. Cisco provides a broader support for hypervisors. You can run the CSR1000V on VMware ESXi 5.0, 5.1, Citrix XenServer 6.0.2, 6.1, RedHat KVM RHEL 6.3, RHEV 3.1 or Amazon Web Services.

I will cover the deployment in a separate blog post. Stay tuned!