Category: MPLS VPN

Coping with Byzantine Routing Failures

One of my readers sent me an interesting challenge:

We have two MPLS providers sending us default routes and it seems like whenever we have problem with SP1 our failover is not happening properly and actually we have to go in manually and influence our traffic to forward via another path.

Welcome to the wondrous world of byzantine routing failures ;)

read more add comment

Could You Replace MPLS/VPN with IPSec-over-Internet?

Someone recently sent me this scenario:

Our CIO has recently told us that he wants to get rid of MPLS because it is too costly and is leaning towards big Internet lines running IPSEC VPNs to connect the whole of Africa.

He was obviously shopping around for free advice (my friend Jeremy Stretch posted his answers to exactly the same set of questions not so long ago); here are the responses I wrote to his questions:

read more see 5 comments

Internet Traffic Gets MPLS Labels When You Deploy MPLS/VPN

A good friend of mine sent me an interesting question:

When I configure mpls ip on an interface, will all packets on that interface be labeled, or just the MPLS/VPN packets received through VRFs? I always assumed that stuff in the global routing table just got forwarded as IP packets without any labels.

Well, that’s not how MPLS works (at least not in its default incarnation on Cisco IOS).

read more see 2 comments

Combining DMVPN with Existing MPLS/VPN Network

One of the Expert Express sessions focused on an MPLS/VPN-based WAN network using OSPF as the routing protocol. The customer wanted to add DMVPN-based backup links and planned to retain OSPF as the routing protocol. Not surprisingly, the initial design had all sorts of unexpectedly complex kludges (see the case study for more details).

Having a really smart engineer on the other end of the WebEx call, I had to ask a single question: “Why don’t you use BGP everywhere” and after a short pause got back the expected reply “wow… now it all makes sense.”

see 7 comments

More Private AS Numbers

Have you ever tried to implement a large-scale DMVPN or MPLS/VPN network using BGP as the routing protocol? If you tried to stitch more than ~1000 sites together you’re well aware of all the pain caused by a small range of private AS numbers defined in RFC 1930. We can kludge our way around the limitation by reusing the same AS number on multiple sites (and using allowas-in when we need full routing information on every site), but such a design clearly sucks.

read more see 4 comments

MPLS/VPN Carrier’s Carrier – Myth or Reality?

Andrew is struggling with MPLS/VPN providers and sent me the following question:

Is "carriers carrier" a real service? I'm having a bit of an issue at the moment with too many MPLS providers […] Carrier’s carrier would be an answer to many of them, but none of the carriers admit to being able to do this, so I was wondering if it's simply that I'm speaking to the wrong people, or whether they really don't...

Short answer: I have yet to see this particular unicorn roaming the meadows of reality.

read more see 16 comments

BGP Best External Explained

Loads of niche features got crammed into (MP)BGP and MPLS since I wrote my MPLS books, most of them trying to tweak BGP (a scalable and reasonably slow routing protocol dealing with behemoth tables) to behave more like an IGP would.

It looks like we’ll never see updated versions of the books, so I’ll try to cover the new features with short videos. The first one on the list: BGP Best External – a mechanism that speeds up MP-IBGP convergence in primary/backup PE-CE scenarios using EBGP.

read more see 8 comments

Internet-in-a-VRF and LFIB explosion

Matthew Stone encountered another unintended consequence of full Internet routing in a VRF design: the TCAM on his 6500 was 80% utilized even though he has the new Sup modules with one million IPv4 routes.

A closer look revealed the first clue: L3 forwarding resources on a Cat6500 are shared between IPv4 routes and MPLS labels (don’t know about you, but I was not aware of that) and half the entries were consumed by MPLS labels:

read more see 10 comments
Sidebar