Abstract

New H3C Technologies commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance, capacity, and feature set of the H3C MSR2600-15-X1 router. The main focus of the project was to validate the platform’s throughput, routing and NAT scale, automation capabilities, high-availability behavior, and support for advanced MPLS, SR-MPLS, and SRv6 services for small- to medium-sized enterprise edge and branch deployments.  

The report positions the MSR2600-15-X1 as an enterprise egress router for VPN, NAT, and IPsec gateway roles. In performance testing, Tolly measured 153Mbps aggregated IPsec throughput with 1400-byte frames and 109Mbps using Spirent’s IPsec iMIX profile. Standard Layer 3 throughput reached 2.991Gbps with 1518-byte frames. Tolly also verified support for 64 BGP neighbors, 50,000 IPv4 routes in both the routing table and FIB, 50,000 IPv6 routes in both the routing table and FIB, and 250,000 NAT sessions.  

Operational flexibility and resiliency were major themes in the report. Tolly validated automation support through TCL, Python, Ansible, Embedded Automation Architecture, and NETCONF, along with WAN optimization using Web Cache. The router also supported hot-swappable interface modules. High-availability capabilities included NQA for static routing, policy-based routing, and VRRP; BFD with a minimum 30ms interval across routing, VRRP, and MPLS scenarios; intelligent NQA for direct packet-loss measurement; interface CRC error down; GIR for maintenance-mode upgrades with no packet loss; and dual-link packet duplication to reduce end-to-end loss.  

The feature set extended well beyond basic enterprise routing. Tolly verified 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, integrated wireless AC functionality, L2TP VPN, IKEv1 and IKEv2, GDVPN, ADVPN, firewall policies, ASPF, IPS, DPI, MPLS OAM and QoS, SR-MPLS BE and TE modes, SRv6 BE and TE modes, EVPN services over SR-MPLS and SRv6, TI-LFA fast reroute, SSL VPN, URL filtering blacklist, DNS application recognition, and anti-virus. Overall, the report presents the MSR2600-15-X1 as a compact enterprise router that combines modest but useful encrypted and routed performance with broad SD-WAN, security, and modern IP/MPLS service capabilities.  

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