White snow agains the black ice ...

Kris recently pointed me to Vyatta and XORP. I did a little evaluation and test of this Vyatta open source software router.

I do like their 'eval kit'.
It contains a guide to start using Vyatta in 30 minutes. It follows the same principle of the O'Reilly Developer Notebook series. In this fast growing IT world we don't really have the time to start reading 396 page-manuals before starting working on something. Discovering something without a manual is something we often do, but it has the disadvantage of loosing much time by figuring the stuff out. So having such a 14 pages quick-start manual is great!

Things I like:

• The CLI (code completion, ? for help, ...)
• The webGUI (fast to do some things)
• Changes you make are not applied live. You must first issue the commit statement.
• When someone else commits changes you see it in your terminal
• Package manager for updates, and apt-get as root for full package management
• Last but not least: It's Open Source

Things I don't like:

• I couldn't find support for cflow/sflow/...(and it isn't in the roadmap)
• My company won't see the advantage of this.

There are 3 editions:

1. Community Edition (Free): Patches and bug fixes every 6 months only, no access to Vyatta support
2. Professional Edition (starting at $647 US): All patches, bug fixes and enhancements and web-based support
3. Enterprise Edition (starting at $897 US): All professional services plus phone support and priority case management

I think these software-based network-devices will become more and more important with the constant evolution towards virtualization. It's certainly something we should keep an eye on.
But why do big companies don't see such benefits in open source? And prolly no benefit in such software based routers/firewalls?

I'd also like to find a table with performance comparisons and scaling info. What kind of hardware will get what kind of routing troughput and delay? (something more than this review)