The Cisco ASR 9906 is a 4 line card slot chassis within the ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers, delivering exceptional scalability, carrier-class reliability, environmentally conscious design, incredible flexibility, and an attractive price-to-performance benchmark to service providers and enterprise customers in edge and core routing.
Product Overview
The Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000 Series operating system is an addition to the current generation of Cisco IOS XR operating systems, delivering the same comprehensive features and system resilience with additional benefits. In Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000, the networking operating system evolves specifically to help customers move and innovate faster. While retaining its breadth of protocol spectrum and feature set, Cisco IOS XR Software has evolved to meet next-generation operational requirements.
As customer organizations have grown, they have sought a flexible operating system that can keep up. The new innovations in Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000 enable incremental builds, agile workflow, and modular delivery of software, while also offering the capability to host third-party applications on Cisco routers.
Features and Benefits
- Fully automated initial installation: Bootable ISO: To simplify installation, Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000 images are in the form of a bootable ISO that’s installed on the system. The software also supports iPXE, which allows the administrator to boot from TFTP, HTTP, or FTP. Auto provisioning: Auto provisioning starts at the end of the software’s boot process in a fresh system installation and serves two functions: static configuration application and script execution. It allows administrators to customize settings easily and automatically, without wasting time on manual configuration.
- Visibility for smarter control, simpler monitoring, and faster troubleshooting: Streaming telemetry: Users can take advantage of streaming telemetry to direct data to a configured receiver. Data can be pushed out at intervals determined by the administrator, at a cadence as low as 10 seconds. Using sophisticated algorithms, a back-end server can then analyze data received from Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000. The data can be encoded in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Google Protocol Buffers (GPB). This analysis enables back-end management systems to measure and even predict control-plane and data-plane trends. Model-driven interfaces: Prior to Release 6.0, administrators relied on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and syslog—techniques that are neither scalable nor easily automated. With this latest release of Cisco IOS XR Software, administrators can more easily work together using the internal system database (SysDB) represented by YANG models. SysDB is not a database in a strict sense, but rather a treelike file system that can provide a common mechanism for management clients to modify or access system information. SysDB stores a variety of types of data, including integers of different sizes, character strings, and externally managed data items.
- Flexible design for agile maintenance and updates: Application hosting: The Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000 architecture supports third-party off-the-shelf applications built with Linux tool chains. Users can run custom applications built with the software development kit that Cisco provides. Application hosting gives administrators a platform for experimenting with their own tools and utilities. Flexible packaging and provisioning: The Release 6.1.1 architecture facilitates modular software delivery of individual components, which increases operational agility and efficiency. Modular delivery of software also eases difficulties during routine upgrades and maintenance fixes, promoting flexible, asynchronous upgrades.
- Open architecture: Linux-based OS: Release 6.1.1 opens up the architecture of Cisco IOS XR Software using a 64-bit Linux-based operating system. (It uses the Wind River 7 distribution, which is compatible with Yocto 1.5 and approved by the Yocto project.) In contrast to the traditional 32-bit QNX OS, Release 6.1.1 can easily integrate applications, configuration-management tools, and auto provisioning. These attributes make it highly automatable and transparent to monitoring and management tools.
- In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU): Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit on ASR 9000 will have a new foundation for ISSU. The virtualized environment running instances of Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit will enable the platform to orchestrate the software upgrade process to minimize the disruption of services in the network without powering down the system to upgrade the operating system.
Platform Support and Compatibility
The Cisco IOS XR 64-Bit supports various platforms in the ASR 9900 and ASR 9000 Series, including the ASR 9906 starting from software release 6.3.1.
System Requirements
For the ASR 9906, compatible components include specific Route Switch Processors (RSPs), Route Processors (RPs), Fabric Cards (FCs), and multiple generations of line cards. Refer to detailed compatibility lists for precise product IDs.