How Many Equal-Cost Paths Can Be Assigned to a Single Route in Junos OS?

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In Junos OS, the maximum number of equal-cost paths that can be assigned to a single route is 4. This means that if there are multiple paths to the same destination with the same cost, up to 4 of these paths can be installed in the routing table and used for load balancing.

Equal-cost multipath (ECMP) is a feature that allows multiple paths to a destination to be used simultaneously to increase network performance and reliability. When ECMP is enabled, the routing table contains multiple next-hop entries for a single destination, each with the same metric or cost.

By default, Junos OS supports up to 4 equal-cost paths for a single route. This value can be changed using the "maximum-paths" command under the routing options hierarchy. For example, to increase the maximum number of equal-cost paths to 8, you can use the following command:

pythonCopy code
set routing-options maximum-paths 8 

It's important to note that increasing the number of equal-cost paths can increase network performance, but it also increases the amount of memory used by the router. Therefore, it's important to carefully consider the impact of increasing the maximum number of paths before making any changes to the configuration.