For me some good news

[robmurphy]

I bought a couple of cisco 3640s cheap from ebay about 2 months back. When I saw the picture I assumed wrongly the 2 RJ45 ports were ethernet ports. Today, again on ebay, I have bought 2 fast ethernet network modules to fit the 3640s. This should give me the chance to make one of the routers usable.

The network modules sold for £14.50 each, so about $22.

It will be interesting to test the routing speed at L3 of the 3640. It will also be interesting to compare the 3640 routing speed with the PC X86 based routers, especially virtualised ones.

One more step to a cisco lab, though given Spidey's comments on CCNP its probably a little late.

 

[drebo]

Cisco's lower-end ISRs and modular routers (basically, the 1000, 2000, and 3000 series models, with the exception of the 3700, x800, and x900 models) are very low performing. They work well as a branch office router, but not much else. Once you start loading them up with services such as NAT, IPSec, firewall, and ACLs, performance starts to drop. See here: http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/routerperformance.pdf . Now, granted, those figures use a small packet size and in general usage, most packets will be larger than that, but the chart gives a pretty decent overview of expected performance.

 

[robmurphy]

I've been a bit busy the last week so sorry for the late reply.

The main objective was to have a Cisco router for learning and experimentation purposes. The routers without any interface cards were not much use. Now at least I can have one of them connected between 2 subnets, and a few other possibilities.

What I will probably do is make sure that the router used for the cards has all its memory slots filled. I can use the memory from the other 3640 to fill te memory slots. Thats assuming there are not already filled.

Rob.