BNG for 6000 customers and 20GB of traffic

Hi
Our ISP is considering Vyos as BNG.
We need a BNG for 6000 customers (dual-stack IPoE connection without rate limiting and 20GB of traffic) and probably some CGNAT.
Which hardware requirements are needed?
Thank you

hi, since the information provided is scarce, any a modern server can help with this role. cheers!

Will you be doing CG-NAT at all?

Yes. We’ll be doing CGNAT but just for ~1000 of those 6000 customers

I dont use NAT myself, but I would say so long as your NIC’s are installed in the correct or appropriate PCI channels, with enough RAM, you should get able to get close to that. You’ll really be limited by the bandwidth between the CPU’s, NIC’s and RAM. Don’t know your hardware platform, so you’ll just need to sort that out.

Thank you, that’s what I thought but I don’t have enough experience in Vyos. I’ve always work with hardware routers (Cisco, Huawei and Mikrotik).

Oh cool. You’ve worked with Mikrotik. Basically follow the same principle as that, somewhat.

Do you have any idea what hardware platform you’re looking at using?

I have no idea; maybe a Dell PowerEdge R650 or something similar

A little off-topic, but I feel the need to add this; MikroTik appliances are not hardware routers. They don’t follow the concept of a control and data plane and also don’t have FPGA/ASICs onboard. All newer Cloud Router Switches and some Cloud Core Routers do have selective hardware offloading capabilities, yes, however, with RouterOS itself all routing protocol related calculations - including BGP - are processed entirely in software :slight_smile:

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Yes, DELL PE work fine. I’d suggest not running anything older than gen 13 PE to ensure you still get support and firmware upgrades going forward. Consider running a box with single CPU and the highest frequency chip your budget can provide. Then disable hyper threading and go through the optimization section in the wiki. Adjust NIC buffers, conntrack table size for NAT, and potentially SMP affinity depending on your needs. Personally, I prefer running X520-DA2 NICs in my boxes, even though they’re EOL, the genuine ones perform extremely well under most conditions.

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You are right. I meant that I’ve never built or buy a server for networking

Thank you very much. A very useful post

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