Cisco IOS XE a departure from the norm...
Thursday, 03 December 2009 15:22.
I've been working with the ASR1006 platform recently and it's been a bit like driving an electric car about. Whilst all the Tesla (note: other brands of high performance electric car are available....golf carts, K.I.T.T, etc.) controls are familiar if something mechanical goes wrong all the experience
you have with the lovable internal combustion engine is out of the window.A point in case is with ASR memory utilisation. In testing, our router began to complain about lsmpi_io memory low free memory and indeed a quick check revealed this to be a pretty low-looking value. A cheeky parse through the trusty CCO output interpretor led to a swift call to Cisco TAC with a potential memory leak.
The actual situation however was much less exciting. This pool is a cache of memory allocated to the kernel on system boot which reports almost complete usage of the pool but never changes. Panic over......as you were. However it is a wake up call to the differences between modular OS systems running on top of a Linux kernel to the IOS's of the past; and the lack of available frames of reference for the systems resource usage such as memory and processor util.
While trying to come to terms with this, and documenting some baseline resource stats for live comparison under scalabilty and performance testing, I did stumble across this CCO entry about ASR system memory allocation, and examining system resources, which may be helpful to others:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9343/products_tech_note09186a0080af252a.shtml
Troubleshooting relatively new hardware and integrating it into your architecture can sometimes seem like a very lonely place. There is nothing more useful than real-world experience when integrating new systems into your architecture. Intergence Systems prides itself with keeping abreast with technology and it's application within complex solutions, so that we can provide the best insight into the work we undertake. My old maths teacher used to say "You're never alone with a protractor!", and although I still think he was a bit weird I kind of understand what he was saying.
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