What’s so great about Vyatta?
In testing and practical use of Vyatta as our primary edge routing platform at Modrus I can say the following:
Stability:
We have deployed Vyatta routers as our primary edge BGP routers, and they have proved to be extremely reliable. Typically we use them in pairs with VRRP for failover.
Scalability:
In planning our deployment of BGP we were keen to know what others had found that worked successfully for them. During this we heard of issues with using generic x86 hardware as a network platform, specifically issues with throughput.
So when we were considering Vyatta I was very keen to ensure that this was not going to be an issue. In testing I was able to easily achieve wire-speed forwarding and with the system running live we have never encountered any throughput capacity issues using it on our gigabit Internet links.
Ease of use:
Having worked with plenty of mainstream network vendor products (the obvious comparison being Cisco) I can say that I love the command line interface of Vyatta. I find it intuitive, easy to read and obvious where new configuration should go, not something I would ever say about Cisco. And in the event of any difficulty the documentation is available and pretty good.
Flexible:
One of the best features is that because it is ‘just software’ you can run it as a virtual machine, which makes workbench testing trivial and really opens up your deployment options. For example we have a small testing and monitoring datacentre running entirely on VMware ESXi using Vyatta as the main border router in a VM.
I should say that no solution is ever perfect, however we have not yet had any occasion to regret choosing Vyatta over the mainstream vendor options, not least because of the potfull of cash we saved ourselves.
Finally I should say that if this blog entry reads like a sales pitch, I suppose it is, however I have no affiliation with Vyatta or financial incentive for writing this.