The licensing system in XR blows chunks (and sometimes core dumps).
Maybe it's got better, but some of my ex-colleagues tell me that's
driving their desire to change vendors. We bought a fleet of boxes with perpetual licensing - until Cisco decided that wouldn't be a thing any more and our boxes became unlicensed. We beat them into submission, but really?

Agree! Their whole licensing model is terrible!

Related to this, sometimes a command will exist in the CLI, but throw a SDK error when you try and commit. In such a rush to port XR to a new platform that they didn't have time to tidy up the CLI and remove
commands that don't actually work, or tidy up the documentation for that matter.

Haven't seen this one yet.

Hardware issues causing boxes (NCS540's specifically) to spontaneously lock up, requiring a re-power to temporarily recover. Same boxes seemed to have DC power supply issues that resulted in what looked like them crowbarring and requiring manual intervention (no other equipment on the same DC supply affected).

Only thing I'm seeing this with are their shitty FTD's.

Their TAC sucks. Hard. Very hard. Extremely hard. In a previous job
it was so bad we ended up with high-touch support, just to get the level of support we previously had from the TAC. Then that went south and we ended up with a Cisco engineer working from our office.

Support is awful. To be fair, I have a very difficult time understanding some of their tech support agents. Which ultimately gets me more frustrated!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Can you elaborate on why Arista over Cisco...

OK, so considering Juniper & Cisco.

Juniper
-------
Has some interesting hardware, and indeed I have deployed some Juniper boxes in the not too distant past (some old
ACX's for "reasons", and some MX204's). I would be hesitant to deploy new Juniper right now until I see how the HP acquisition plays out. The MX204 is a nice box, but between HP and Micron I'd have to think twice right now.


Cisco
-----

Their code quality is questionable. 20+ years ago there was an issue where frames with a '4' in the MAC address at a
particular position were assumed to be IPv4 (not a valid assumption). Guess who /reintroduced/ that bug only a couple of years back, in a modern release of XR? Some of the bugs were so bad you'd ask yourself which work-experience kid wrote the code.

The licensing system in XR blows chunks (and sometimes core dumps). Maybe it's got better, but some of my ex-colleagues tell me that's driving their desire to change vendors. We bought a fleet of boxes with perpetual licensing - until Cisco decided that wouldn't be a thing any more and our boxes became unlicensed. We beat them into submission, but really?

Their documentation sucks. It'll happily tell you a feature exists, and how to use it. Except it's not supported by the platform. Been bitten by this a few times.

Related to this, sometimes a command will exist in the CLI, but throw a SDK error when you try and commit. In such a rush to port XR to a new platform that they didn't have time to tidy up the CLI and remove commands that don't actually work, or tidy up the documentation for that matter.

Hardware issues causing boxes (NCS540's specifically) to spontaneously lock up, requiring a re-power to temporarily recover. Same boxes seemed to have DC power supply issues that resulted in what looked like them crowbarring and requiring manual intervention (no other equipment on the same DC supply affected).

Their TAC sucks. Hard. Very hard. Extremely hard. In a previous job it was so bad we ended up with high-touch support, just to get the level of support we previously had from the TAC. Then that went south and we ended up with a Cisco engineer working from our office.

That said, if your issue is serious enough that it becomes a CAP case, then you'll probably get excellent support. The last one I was involved in, we had Cisco on the phone 24x7 for over a week. It was a very low level issue with a NIC driver and we were dealing with the guys that wrote the code. We and they took it in shifts, 24x7. That case and the investigation were going to be the subject of an AusNOG talk until COVID happened.

To be fair, most of my recent Cisco experience is with the NCS platform, but several of these issues are just as likely to affect their other platforms as well.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
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Related to this, sometimes a command will exist in the CLI, but throw
SDK error when you try and commit. In such a rush to port XR to a new
platform that they didn't have time to tidy up the CLI and remove commands that don't actually work, or tidy up the documentation for th
matter.

Haven't seen this one yet.

I first saw it when trying to fiddle with PCP bits on inner tags. The commands existed in the CLI to do it, but the SDK said no when I tried to commit.

VLAN ranges also failed miserably - there was one instance where it worked, but if you had double tagged traffic then it was a no-go (even if the range was just on the outer tags).

There were a bunch of other cases too that escape me. Our Cisco rep basically said "yeah, they rush to get the new boxes to market and don't get time to clean up the CLI & docs". Thanks Cisco.

Hardware issues causing boxes (NCS540's specifically) to spontaneously
lock up, requiring a re-power to temporarily recover. Same boxes seem
to have DC power supply issues that resulted in what looked like them crowbarring and requiring manual intervention (no other equipment on t
same DC supply affected).

Only thing I'm seeing this with are their shitty FTD's.

We have a handful of those in my current job - fortunately I have nothing to do with them, but I have heard of PSU's failing.

Support is awful. To be fair, I have a very difficult time understanding some of their tech support agents. Which ultimately gets me more frustrated!

Lack of knowledge is another factor. "Please reseat the line card". "It's a fixed chassis, should I use a cold chisel or an angle grinder?". "Download this IOS" - but that's XE, and this is an XR box...

...and the old "meet the response SLA by asking the customer questions, for the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time, that they provided the answers to in the original case creation".

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: TassieBob BBS, Hobart, Tasmania (21:3/169)

Lack of knowledge is another factor. "Please reseat the line card". "It's a fixed chassis, should I use a cold chisel or an angle grinder?". "Download this IOS" - but that's XE, and this is an XR box...

:D

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)