Juniper J2300/J4300 vs Olive

point1

Hello,

I am beginning my Juniper cert studies and I was wondering if people can chime in with regards to what I ought to do.

For lab requirements, should I build hardware Olives or start looking into J2300s/J4300s.

I am looking at the "ER" track.

thanks!

Aldur

I would recommend the J series routers for the ER track for the following reasons.

- ER track is heavy on services, you don't have the hardware in a Olive to run services. Eg. IPsec, GRE, Stateful firewall, NAT.

- Sparse mode multicast will be limited. There's no tunnel PIC's in an Olive so you will have to make your first hop router the RP which really cuts down on what you can do.

- Limited CoS functionality. You can't configure CoS on an fxp interface and with hardware Olives thats all you have. I've been told that you can configure CoS on an em interface that is used with Vmware Olives but I haven't tried this myself.

Without a doubt the biggest limitation will be the lack of services on an Olive. Currently about 1/3 of the ER track is on services and so you will need it least some J routers for this.

HTH