Friday, February 8, 2013

Cisco releases EIGRP as an RFC

Cisco announced that they are releasing the basic EIGRP to the IETF as an Informational RFC. I think this is very welcome, and probably they realized that people are moving away from this protocol if they want to work on a multivendor environment, and Cisco just can't keep it for themselves.

On the other hand they also say that: "Advanced features of EIGRP, such as EIGRP stub, needed for DMVPN and large-scale campus deployment, will not be released to the IETF." Are they serious???  First, I wouldn't call the stub feature as advanced, in my experience you must have it, if you want to run EIGRP on a mid size (30 - 50 devices) environment cause otherwise it's just not scalable, even with implemented summarization and stub features, you can start to get stuck in actives from time to time on this size, causing hard time to network operators.

So with this release I don't expect organization starting to migrate to it, at least I wouldn't do it. I think w/o the stub feature you can only deploy it in small size environment, where usually there are no multiple vendors. While the direction is good, they should release all the features.

Cisco Q&A:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/ps6554/ps6599/ps6630/qa_C67-726299.html

No comments: