Juniper migration experiences

[fprowse]

Given that we have both Juniper staff and customers that have migrated to a Juniper Networks switching platform it would be great if we could hear the experience of customers during and after this move. There are some exciting features in the EX-Series that make a positive change, reducing the complexity of the network and making operation simpler...what was your experience?

Francois

[samdeckert]

Having recently introduced Juniper to a predominately Cisco customer upon their recent relocation to a new building, I was pleasantly suprised by the EX platforms (and so was the customer).  We deployed 8208s and 4200s.

To name a few of the features/benefits that we found useful during the implementation:

- JUNOS benefits...previous configs being stored, being able to compare / rollback with ease.  Config grouping for reduced size and complexity.

- Redundant Trunk Groups

- Powerful tracing capabliities

- Packet capturing on the box, then being able to read the files with wireshark etc

- Being able to restart specific processes without reloading the box

- Managing the 4200 stacks was a breeze, simplified support having a single stack per floor

We were able to interconnect with the customers existing Cisco environment during the migration without an issue, even when at layer 2 via 802.3ad and dot1q.

Overall a good experience.

[dfex]

We recently migrated a customer from of mixed-vendor environment across to EX2200 and 4200s.  While a big win for the was a single management interface, the features that really made JUNOS stand out were:

- Port-Roles: made it simple for technical support staff to provision access ports, especially where VLAN, QoS and STP configuration was all reduced to a couple of clicks in J-Web

- Virtual Chassis: we extended a VC between three buildings to reduce the complexity of the spanning-tree topology which has made the network design much simpler

- System Snapshots: the customer has experienced a switch failure since the initial deployment, but with the system snapshot feature and a USB key, we had them back online within minutes

[CJCalderon]

Hi Sam,

That's great. By chance did you use the IOS-to-Junos conversion tools?

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/community/junos/tech-topics/translation-to-junos/#Overview 

Curious to know if there were any tools that we were able to offer that helped you along your conversion path.

[samdeckert]

Hi CJ,

It was a greenfield site...so we built the configs from scratch.

I did refer to a 'Juniper EX / Cisco Catalyst Interoperability Cookbook' by NetworkTest extensively when determining the best means of interconnecting the two environments and providing configuration recommendations ot the customers Cisco support team.

Cheers,

Sam

[tcalis]

Hi,

We did not have any major issue while migrating yet.

Most impressive to the customer (we use it a lot in pre-sales promo-talk):

- Easy rollback with history of 50

- Automatic backup on commit

- replace command

These are very nicely documented in one of the day one booklets. (the one about troubleshooting is very highly rated as well)

Problems/remarks:

- integrating NSM is not easy for me, perhaps there exists some good documentation with best practices?  I keep on doing the work on the CLI instead of using the NSM to configure the switches.

- I remember that the VC was not redundant and we did not have any major alarms (as far as I remember), just saw it when documenting the VC before going into production. (some PCIE cables were not completely inserted)

- the 'vlan members all' feature is not working as wished when one VLAN should not be tagged.

KR,

  Thomas  

[CJCalderon]

Thanks for the feedback Sam. Glad to hear the cookbook was useful.

As you may know the Cookbook is a companion piece to the Juniper EX Series/Cisco Catalyst Interoperability Test Results. Both the test results and cookbook can be downloaded here http://networktest.com/jnpriop/ (registration required)

[CJCalderon]

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for your comments. Good to know the Day One booklets are useful.

Regarding the problems and remarks you've highlighted, we'll run these by the appropriate product teams and technical documentation teams and aim to improve the resources that we have. Your feedback is helpful.