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Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V - Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

Cisco Systems, Inc. | 03.16.04.aS

Linux/Unix, Other Cisco IOS XE - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Reviews from AWS Marketplace

2 AWS reviews

    Sean Rutter

Excellent router platform

  • June 13, 2014
  • Review verified by AWS Marketplace

I had no issues getting started using this product 5 minutes after turning up an instance. There is a very good whitepaper listed in the documentation resources that helps to get you started.

There is another document available that lists the features that are not available on the CSR1000v inside AWS such as Multicast and 802.1q sub interfaces - the CSR supports them but AWS does not. The features I need to use are IPSEC, VRF, MP-BGP as well as integration with my existing NMS and all of that is there (some of these features, if not all, require the advanced features license).

It's IOS XE so you can dive right in and start configuring. There is of course plenty of IOS XE documentation. If the GUI is your thing then Cisco Config Professional supports the CSR1000v - I prefer the CLI.

I needed to implement a site-site VPN connection gateway for a number of our customers in order to access VPC resources and transit data to a 3rd party via VPN. The 3rd party supplier and the CSR1000V are connected to a VGW. The CSR1000V connected to a VGW so I can use BGP to dynamically insert routes into a VPC route table. Because I need to maintain customer isolation I terminate the customer VPNs in VRFs on the CSR1000V. I run 2x CSR1000v in different AZ as BGP peers to provide HA to my customers. .

To summarize, I recommend this product to help solve networking connectivity issues that are beyond the functionality of the VGW. There is good "CSR1000v inside AWS" documentation to get you going. It's IOS so network engineers already know how to use it. Pay attention to the AWS feature caveats and design around them. A great product.


    Mile High IT

Pretty cool device for AWS, still needs some work to be great

  • March 31, 2014
  • Review verified by AWS Marketplace

So I can't say this blew my hair back. Documentation from Cisco is very vague and not very well documented past the initial setup. Also a lot of their documentation gets intermixed with the VMWare version of this router, and they don't cross over that much. Leaves you scratching your head wondering WTF is up with the documentation.

Once you finally get it up and running though, it's pretty much a standard Cisco router. However, that is also where the honeymoon ends. I hope you like CLI, cause that's the only way you can program it. I also hope you enjoy calling Cisco, regardless of your partner level, and have their own techs questions "what kind of router did you say it was again?" I find it funny Cisco has pushed us to use ASDM and other GUI config tools and then none of it can hook up to their "virtual" router. Seems a bit backward.

So basically, it's a very cool product, and actually very revolutionary on Cisco's part that they recognize the need for a product such as this, especially with AWS. But overall it seems like an experiment that nobody even at Cisco knows much about and it lacks the basic documentation that even their ASA line has. Get ready to get your mits dirty in CLI again like it's 1998!


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