Abstract

H3C commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance, capacity, and feature set of the H3C CR16000-M router family. The main focus of the project was to validate the platform’s forwarding scale, high-availability mechanisms, operator and campus access functions, and support for advanced carrier and enterprise networking features across cloud service, metro, BRAS, and IPRAN deployments.  

The report applies to the full CR16000-M family, including the CR16000-M1A, CR16000-M8, and CR16000-M16. Tolly verified extensive forwarding and control-plane scale, including support for 1 million MAC addresses, MAC learning at 313,000 addresses per second, 25 million IPv4 routes, 12 million IPv6 routes, 4 million IPv4 FIB entries, 2 million IPv6 FIB entries, 120,000 IPv4 ACL rules, 32,000 IPv6 ACL rules, 512,000 QoS queues, and 319ms of line-rate traffic buffering per port. The platform also supported 16,000 VRF instances, 1 million MPLS LDP LSPs, 16,000 MPLS VPLS tunnels, 32,000 MPLS VLL services, 8,000 MPLS SR TE policy tunnels, and 32,000 SRv6 TE policy tunnels. Access-scale validation included 64,000 PPPoE, 64,000 IPoE, 64,000 802.1X, and 64,000 L2TP sessions, plus 64,000 L2TP tunnels.  

Security and gateway functions were also tested. With the MIC-SEC-M encryption card, the CR16000-M supported up to 16,000 IPsec tunnels, and the CR16000-M8 and M16 reached 32Gbps aggregated IPsec throughput. NAT performance reached 16Gbps to 20Gbps aggregated on the CR16000-M1A depending on frame size, and 31Gbps aggregated on the CR16000-M8 with 5 million NAT sessions. Tolly also verified 320Gbps throughput on the CR16000-M1A and 200Gbps slot bandwidth on the CR16000-M8 and M16 for tested Ethernet frame sizes.  

High availability was a major emphasis. Tolly validated 3ms BFD intervals, less than 50ms failover for BFD-based OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP, and less than 50ms failover for OSPF, IS-IS, MPLS LDP, MPLS L3VPN, MPLS SR with TI-LFA, SRv6 with TI-LFA, VPNv6 FRR, and SRv6 egress protection. Chassis models also demonstrated redundant MPUs, switch fabric cards, and power supplies, with no packet loss in a wide range of NSR scenarios. Additional feature validation included SR/SRv6, EVPN, FlexE, Flex-Algo, iFIT, Telemetry, NetStream, NETCONF/YANG, VXLAN, BIERv6, BGP FlowSpec, 5-level HQoS, 1588v2 PTP with ±5ns accuracy, and SyncE with measured frequency accuracy of -0.00008PPB. Overall, the report presents the CR16000-M series as a high-scale, multi-service router platform combining strong forwarding capacity, service-rich access functions, and carrier-grade resiliency.  

Routers tested in this report:

• H3C CR16000-M1A — Box-style cloud service router in the CR16000-M family, aimed at carrier and enterprise network positions requiring high-density Ethernet and WAN interfaces.  
• H3C CR16000-M8 — Chassis-based CR16000-M router for multi-service networking with high availability, strong forwarding capacity, and modular expansion.  
• H3C CR16000-M16 — High-capacity chassis router in the CR16000-M family for large-scale cloud, carrier, and service-provider deployments.