Abstract

H3C commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance, capacity, and feature set of the H3C CR16000-F series router family. The main focus of the project was to validate the platform’s forwarding scale, high-availability behavior, operator-facing broadband and gateway features, and support for advanced routing, synchronization, automation, and service-convergence capabilities across metro, BRAS, IPRAN, and enterprise-gateway use cases.  

The report covers the full CR16000-F family, including the CR16003E-F, CR16005E-F, CR16006-F, CR16010-F, CR16010E-F, CR16010H-F, and CR16018-F. Tolly verified large-scale forwarding resources, including support for 1 million MAC addresses, 25 million IPv4 routes, 12 million IPv6 routes, 4 million IPv4 FIB entries, 2 million IPv6 FIB entries, 240,000 IPv4 ACL rules, 64,000 IPv6 ACL rules, 512,000 QoS queues, and 319ms of line-rate buffering per port. The platform also supported up to 16,000 VRF instances, 1 million MPLS LDP label-switched paths, 16,000 MPLS VPLS tunnels, 32,000 MPLS VLL services, 8,000 MPLS SR TE policy tunnels, and 32,000 SRv6 TE policy tunnels. Broadband access scale included 64,000 PPPoE, 64,000 IPoE, and 64,000 802.1X sessions per line card, plus 128,000 L2TP sessions and 64,000 L2TP tunnels.  

Tolly also validated security and gateway performance. With the appropriate encryption cards, the platform supported up to 16,000 IPsec tunnels. The CR16010H-F reached 19Gbps aggregated IPsec throughput, while the CR16003E-F and CR16010E-F reached 32Gbps aggregated IPsec throughput. NAT performance reached 320Gbps aggregated on the CR16010H-F and 160Gbps aggregated on the CR16003E-F and CR16010E-F, depending on card type, traffic profile, and session scale. A 16 x 100GbE line card also delivered 1.6Tbps of slot bandwidth at 512-byte frames and larger.  

High availability was a major emphasis. Tolly verified hot backup of MPUs, switch fabric cards, power modules, line cards, and sub-cards, along with extensive NSR and FRR coverage. The platform delivered less than 50ms failover for BFD-based OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP, plus OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS LDP, MPLS L3VPN, MPLS SR with TI-LFA, SRv6 with TI-LFA, VPNv6 FRR, and SRv6 egress protection. In addition, no packet loss was observed in a wide range of NSR scenarios involving OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, MPLS LDP, MPLS L3VPN, VPNv4/VPNv6, multicast, and L2VPN services when the active MPU failed.  

Feature validation further highlighted multi-service convergence. Tolly verified support for SR/SRv6, EVPN, EVPN over SRv6 TE policy, FlexE, Flex-Algo, iFIT, Telemetry, NetStream, NETCONF/YANG, BGP FlowSpec, BIERv6, VXLAN, S-Trunk, 5-level HQoS, 1588v2 PTP with ±5ns accuracy, and SyncE with measured frequency accuracy of -0.00008PPB. Overall, the report presents the CR16000-F series as a high-capacity carrier and enterprise router platform combining large forwarding scale, strong resilience, broad subscriber and service support, and extensive modern IP/MPLS and SRv6 feature coverage.  

Router models used in this test:

• H3C CR16003E-F — Compact model in the CR16000-F high-end router family for carrier and enterprise multi-service networking.  
• H3C CR16005E-F — CR16000-F series router model validated as part of the same platform family.  
• H3C CR16006-F — CR16000-F series router model; the report notes this model uses a Clos non-blocking architecture and supports front-to-rear airflow.  
• H3C CR16010-F — CR16000-F series router model; also identified as using Clos architecture and front-to-rear airflow.  
• H3C CR16010E-F — CR16000-F router model included in the validated product family and used in specific NAT and IPsec performance tests.  
• H3C CR16010H-F — CR16000-F router model included in the family and used in specific NAT and IPsec performance tests.  
• H3C CR16018-F — Largest listed CR16000-F router model; the report notes Clos architecture and front-to-rear airflow support for this model.