Introduction to QFabric

JunOS - Control and Forwarding Plane

JunOS separates the control plane and the forwarding (data) plane. The control plane contains the processes that control routing and switching protocols and the forwarding plane processes and forwards the frames and/or packets.

Routing Engine (RE): responsible for performing protocol updates and system management. JunOS runs these protocols and processes in protected memory. RE maintains the routing tables, bridging table, and the primary forwarding table which connects to the Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE)

Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE): Runs on ASICs for increased performance. PFE is focused on forwarding operations and not protocol updates and system management which provides reliability and high performance. The forwarding table (FT) is recieved from the RE through an internal link.

This architecture allows for high availability features such as graceful routing engine switch-over (GRES), nonstop active routing (NSR), unified in-service software upgrades (ISSU).

JunOS - Configuration - Basics 101

Juniper has a powerful command line and it allows for configuration changes to be verified before committing. JunOS performs a Sanity Check before committing (writing) the configuration and creates a backup of the running-config with each validated commit. This empowers the administrator to rollback the configuration with ease.

New to Networking

I have seen many questions in regards to networking and where to start. Juniper has some great tutorials and some incentives to certify on their products.To get an agnostic understanding of networking basics then click Network Fundamentals

BTW: I could not find the same offering from Cisco :(