[nsp] GE aggregation for last mile Ethernet

[Niels Bakker]

* swmike at swm.pp.se (Mikael Abrahamsson) [Thu 26 Jun 2003, 05:31 CEST]:
> On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Pete Kruckenberg wrote:
>> Sounds pretty cool, inexpensive, simple to manage/operate,
>> and scalable. Is there any way to do this with Cisco?
> You should search for "private vlan" and "private vlan edge" on 
> www.cisco.com and see if this may work for you. It has some constraints 
> but with careful thought it will enable you to use 3550 and 6500 together 
> to (probably) achieve what's requested.

"ip local-proxy-arp"

Warning, non cisco-nsp content below:


> Otherwise you might want to look into RFC3069 and use Extreme Networks 
> boxen for the L3 routing. It will only do 4000 vlans per box, but you can 
> use a $4-5k unit to do this (all their i-chipset boxen supports it).

I used to work at Bredband Benelux back in 2001 and helped design a
network similar to what Mr Parks IV proposed.  We had some issues with
Extreme gear not living up to its expectations.  First, 4096 VLANs were
claimed but only 3072 were supported due to constraints in another part
of the software whose authors apparently didn't tell the glossy
brochure-writing folks about.  Secondly, the box croaked in a bad way
(started flooding all packets) somewhere between the creation of VLANs
1600 to 1800 if EAPS was enabled.  At the time the focus was on
releasing a new major version of their software instead of fixing bugs
customers were actively running into (this was around 6.3.0, if I recall
correctly, but memory is hazy).  But Bredband Benelux quit operations
before going live with this design, so Extreme wasn't exactly given much
opportunity to fix it at all.

Regards,


	-- Niels.

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