Juniper Lightboard Series - Intro to Juniper Routing - Part 1

hey guys welcome to my very first juniper lightboard video and what better way to keep things off and to talk about one of my very favorite topics the Juniper fundamentals you can rest assured I'll be doing additional videos on advanced topics such as evpn data center architecture MPLS multicast closet service I'll be covering it all but I really wanted to provide a resource for those who are brand new to Juno's to come and watch a couple of videos and to make its alert some of the fundamental concepts around judo's so with that what we're gonna start with one of the most fundamental concepts in the Juniper operating system is this separation between the control plane and the forwarding plane and this is truly one of the most important concepts of grasp because it equally applies whether we're dealing with the routing platforms the switching platforms or the firewall platforms they all share this common design goal of clean separation between the control plane and the forwarding plane so let's start with the control plane that's this box that exists up here above this dotted line the control plane consists of a process or a piece of hardware that essentially is what's known as our routing engine the routing engine can be called the brains of the operation and essentially it's it's the brains of the operation because it's responsible for maintaining things like our routing tables our bridging tables our forwarding tables and also whenever we log into the CLI we're logging into the Junos operating system that exists up here um the routing engine is monitoring things like fans alarms temperature controls it truly is the brains of the operation right here so if we're running BGP or OSPF these are all routing protocol is that I'll be covering it a little bit later all those things actually exists up here in the routing engine now if the routing engine is the brains of the operation what we have down below is what's known as the forwarding plane and the forwarding plane is essentially the bronz of the opera' of the operation so with the forwarding plane what we see down here is we have a different set of hardware which is essentially known as our pocket forwarding engine you pocket forwarding engine is essentially responsible for forwarding packets and it does that really really great speed so essentially packets come in they get forwarded out the packet forwarding engine is also responsible for receiving the forwarding table from the routing engine so that it can essentially operate on those packets as they come in and come out now there's other types of packets like exception packets and those types of things I'll be covering those in a little bit later but essentially this architecture where we separate routing engine and packet forwarding engine or what we would say control plane versus forwarding plane is really the most fundamental concept to master again a routing engine is the brains of the operation responsible for maintaining all of our routing tables and so on and so forth the packet forwarding engine is really just an unintelligent piece of hardware and all its remaining responsibility to do is just simply for packets and afford them as quickly as possible now this might not seem like a really fundamentally different architecture if you look at most of the other router vendors that are out there they all employ a very similar architecture to this but if you think back to 1998 when the Juniper m40 flagship product was first released this was the first time that any networking vendor had ever done this before juniper introduced this clean separation between routing plane and forwarding plane or control plane a forwarding plane everybody was doing something that's known as process switching and with process switching you had a router and yet interfaces and essentially you had a single CPU in that router and that single CPU is responsible for both managing the router as well as forwarding packets so what would happen is if you had a high degree of bandwidth or he had a lot of packets coming through the box where there was a heavy traffic utilization you might see that routing protocol updates might get dropped or other types of anomalies might happen because you had a single CPU that was dedicated to all of these functions and so this design here with juniper came out with this this architecture with the flagship in 40 in 1998 was really fundamentally different from what anybody else was doing it was really a game changer and it's what allowed Juniper to really put themselves on the map inside the service variety arena because of this architecture they were able to get really really fast performance now before I close this video I will say this architecture also lends itself to doing some other really cool things like in service software upgrades where we can basically upgrade the software on the routing engine while we're still forwarding packets so you could take this routing engine down during an upgrade bounce it bring it back up but the forwarding aid engine is still able to forward packets during that time because it's essentially a completely autonomous system if you would it doesn't require that it requires a routing engine for updates but it doesn't require the routing engine to actually four packets so you know you could do things like graceful routing engine switchover you could do in service software upgrades and really at the end of the day this is really all about just cleanly separating these two components so they can get the best performance as possible now when we come back I'll be covering other types of things I'll be getting into more detail into the forwarding table things like exception packets and how we forward traffic up between the routing engine and the PFP we'll be covering all of that in future videos so thanks for joining don't forget to Like and subscribe so you can see additional videos as they come out and see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: ShortestPathFirst

Views: 5,890

Rating: 4.973856 out of 5

Keywords: Junos, Juniper Networks, Routing, Introduction to Routing, JNCIA, Lightboard, Routing Tutorial, Routing Engine, Packet Forwarding Engine, Routing Table, Forwarding Table, Control Plane, Forwarding Plane

Id: _Qdx91Qs8TI

Length: 6min 4sec (364 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019