[c-nsp] IP SLA

[Saku Ytti]

On (2011-10-19 18:01 +0200), Andrew Miehs wrote:

> I have been looking at IP SLA and was wondering whether there are any appliances around which emulate Ciscos IP SLA so that you can use it as a responder, or even better, the transmitter end?

Have you found any? I'd be very interested in commercial solution also.
Preferably one which does hardware timestamping.
IP SLA is proprietary protocol, so technically if you want to do commercial
solution, you'd need to buy permission for it from Cisco. And I know many
people buying dedicated Cisco CPE for IP SLA responders, so it might be
that companies have tried to build IP SLA responders but Cisco has said no.

In the mean time, co-worker just released[0] alpha version of Cisco IP
SLA/Juniper RPM responder for Linux.
It supports IP SLA Control packets and few tests, IP SLA UDP Jitter
millisecond, IP SLA UDP Jitter microsecond, RPM ICMP Ping Timestamp and RPM
UDP Ping Timestamp, but it wouldn't be exactly complicated to add support
for further tests.

It has some novel features, which makes it 0-touch. So if you need
responder for L3 MPLS VPNs, you will never touch the responder. You just
add VLAN+VRF+IP to neighbouring PE box. The responder code is MAC, VLAN and
IP address agnostic and handles them statelessly.

Accuracy to SRX or ISR responder is 1-2 magnitudes better, in terms of
jitter, so you should see your tests 50% better as you can mostly exclude
any inaccuracies incurred by responder.

Only way to make it more convenient would be to add support for BGP VPN RR
peering, and look for some magic RT in routes, if found, advertise your
prefix and copy label to use for egress. Then provisioning of test would be
'route-target both ASN:magic' in VRF definition. 

[0] https://github.com/cmouse/ip-sla-responder
-- 
  ++ytti