Abstract

New H3C Technologies commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance, capacity, and feature set of the H3C SR6608-M Intelligent Aggregation Router. The main focus of the project was to validate the platform’s throughput, routing and VPN scale, high-availability behavior, automation capabilities, and support for advanced MPLS, SR-MPLS, and SRv6 services in full-scenario aggregation and SD-WAN-oriented deployments.  

Tolly tested the SR6608-M using the RT-RFU-560-G routing and forwarding unit. In performance testing, the platform delivered 13.5Gbps aggregated IPsec throughput with 1400-byte frames and 6.8Gbps using Spirent’s IPsec iMIX profile. Standard Layer 3 throughput reached 79.15Gbps with 1518-byte frames, while accelerate mode using hardware forwarding achieved 320Gbps aggregated throughput across frame sizes from 64 bytes to 1518 bytes. The router also supported 4,096 BGP neighbors, 3,000,000 IPv4 routes in both the routing table and FIB, 3,000,000 IPv6 routes in both the routing table and FIB, and 16,000,000 NAT sessions.  

Operational flexibility and resiliency were major themes in the report. Tolly verified automation support through TCL, Python, Ansible, Embedded Automation Architecture, and NETCONF. The router also supported WAN optimization through Web Cache, hot-swappable interface cards, and redundant hot-swappable power supplies. High-availability features included NQA for static routing, policy-based routing, and VRRP; BFD with a minimum 10ms interval across routing, VRRP, and MPLS scenarios; intelligent NQA for direct packet-loss measurement; interface CRC error down; and GIR for maintenance-mode software updates without packet loss.  

The feature set extended well beyond baseline aggregation routing. Tolly validated BGP-LS, BGP FlowSpec for IPv4 and IPv6, MVPN and NG-MVPN, UCMP and ECMP, VXLAN and EVPN VXLAN, PPPoE server and client modes, NAT44/NAT444/NAT66/NAT64, GRE, mGRE, EoGRE, L2TP VPN, IKEv1 and IKEv2, GDVPN, and ADVPN. The platform also supported firewall policies, ASPF, IPS, DPI, MPLS OAM, MPLS QoS, SR-MPLS BE and TE modes, SRv6 BE and TE modes, EVPN services over SR-MPLS and SRv6, TI-LFA fast reroute, SRv6 OAM, SSL VPN, URL filtering blacklist, DNS application recognition, anti-virus, and IPv6 DDNS. Overall, the report presents the SR6608-M as a high-capacity aggregation router that combines substantial forwarding scale with broad service support, strong automation, and resilient modern IP/MPLS and SRv6 capabilities.