Cisco – Delay or Offset-List for EIGRP tuning

ciscoeigrp

Studying for CCNP-ROUTE – everything I read says it's preferable to use delay and offset-lists for metric tuning vs. say bandwidth in EIGRP. In practice what is more commonly used out of those two options (delay/Offset-lists)? How common is low level metric tuning for EIGRP?

Best Answer

Any metric manipulation I've ever seen has been via offset-lists. This allows very fine-grained control over the metric, and removes the need to calculate metric differences based on different interface delays.

Note that offset-lists have the added benefit of being applied (optionally) per-interface. So you can essentially do everything that a delay change does with an offset-list.

In the 'wild', the only thing my org uses offset-lists for is to force traffic to take a particular backup WAN link when the primary is having issues that don't actually take it down. That is -- I've seen very little EIGRP metric manipulation in production networks. I'm sure someone else will almost immediately disagree. =)

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