Bandwidth-tests with my Juniper J2320 Router

The Juniper J2320 is a modular router for enterprises running desktops, servers, VoIP, CRM/ERP/SCM applications. It offers three PIM slots for additional LAN/WAN connectivity and has all the basic licenses for BGP, OSPF and all that fancy stuff included. This is especially nice since an advanced routing license for an EX-series costs more than the whole J-Series.

Routing Configuration

On a J2320, you have to define security zones as well as a policy. If you don’t have your interface assigned to a Zone, the packet will be dropped due to no zone or Nullzone is bound. To prevent this, you can configure your j-Series like this:

root@j2320# set security zones security-zone external interfaces ge-1/0/0
root@j2320# set security zones security-zone external interfaces ge-1/0/1

Also you have to configure a default policy (you can certainly put your own stuff in, this was just for quick testing):

root@j2320# set security policies default-policy permit-all

The show configuration command should show something like this:

root@j2320# show security
zones {
    security-zone internal {
    interfaces {
        ge-1/0/0;
    }
    }
    security-zone external {
    interfaces {
        ge-1/0/1;
    }
    }
}
policies {
    default-policy {
    permit-all;
    }
}

Routing Performance

For routing performance, we use iperf again, since it already did a pretty good job on our last test.

# iperf -s

On the other machine i run:

# iperf -c 10.0.2.5
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.2.5, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.5 port 34583 connected with 10.0.2.5 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   511 MBytes   429 Mbits/sec

I also tried this using 64 byte packets again:

# iperf -c 10.0.2.5 -l 64
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.2.5, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.5 port 54787 connected with 10.0.2.5 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   497 MBytes   417 Mbits/sec

417Mbit/s no matter how small your packets are, that’s not good and not bad, it’s average. Not perfect (since it is a 1GE interface), but then again, it was not meant to be a multi-Gbit router.

But i thought there had to be more, so i cramped my brains out and came up with the following..

Routing Performance (other PIC)

Once i noticed the slow performance, i had the idea of plugging one of the uplinks into another PIC of the J2320, therefor maximizing it’s backplane capabilities. The results with 64 byte packets:

# iperf -c 10.0.2.5 -l 64
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.2.5, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.5 port 41937 connected with 10.0.2.5 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   639 MBytes   536 Mbits/sec

Once again disappointing with only 536Mbit/s. But when i started pulling -l 128 again, i was amazed:

# iperf -c 10.0.2.5 -l 128
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.2.5, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.5 port 41525 connected with 10.0.2.5 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.04 GBytes   895 Mbits/sec

895Mbit/s! That’s a value i can show around!

Conclusion

The J-Series router is a very nifty little piece of hardware. If you want firewalling, this will be the right coice. If you want to use it as a Backbone router, you might get into trouble during dDoS Season (School Vacation).

I am currently thinking about selling it as mint-condition (since it has only been used for a few days in the lab). If you’re interested, follow me at my Twitter feed and as soon as i get to put up the Auction, i will post a link there.

Let’s see, maybe if my Hardware sales go up a bit, i might even be able to test some even fancier equipment. I’d so love to see bigger Juniper Routers and their Routing Protocols under a lot of stress. Hope that this time comes soon so i can unleash mausezahn on them. :)

Best regards and thanks for reading