[c-nsp] ME3600X & A9K L2 Protocol Tunnelling support

Fri Nov 1 13:40:10 EDT 2013

ME3600X, ME3800X, ASR903 and ASR9K are CE2.0 certified. CE2.0 has two options for L2 control protocol, option 1 and 2. ME3600X supports both the options. ME3600X by default drop all L2 control protocols and one needs to configure "l2protocol xxx" command to enable the transport of control protocol.
L2 control protocol has two types of configuration, tunnel and forward. Tunnel is Cisco proprietary and requires tunnel to be supported on the remote device. It is supported with both bridge and Xconnect configuration. Forward on the other hand can interoperate with any switch since it does not change the mac address of control protocols to Cisco well known mac address. It is also supported with both bridge and Xconnect configuration. I would recommend to use "forward" option since CE2.0 options are supported with "forward" configuration only. L2 protocol commands are only allowed on the EVC interfaces. There is no support on Trunk interface. CE2.0 is supported since Release 3.9, March 2013.
The behavior on 9K is different. Below is the link with the command and behavior difference details.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/metro/me3600x_3800x/software/design/guide/ASR9K_interop_white_paper.pdf

Best Regards,

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From: Pshem Kowalczyk <pshem.k at gmail.com<mailto:pshem.k at gmail.com>>
Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 11:49 AM
To: Jason Lixfeld <jason at lixfeld.ca<mailto:jason at lixfeld.ca>>
Cc: "cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net>" <cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net>>
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] ME3600X & A9K L2 Protocol Tunnelling support

Hi Jason,

ME3600 does support tunnelling of l2 control frames on xconnect EVCs,
these are a snippets of config from our network:

service instance 2020 ethernet
  encapsulation default
  l2protocol tunnel
  service-policy input PM-CUST-DEFAULT-200M-BD-IN
  service-policy output PM-CUST-DEFAULT-200M-OUT
  xconnect 10.123.143.1 134300001 encapsulation mpls
   mtu 9000
!

service instance 1602 ethernet
  encapsulation dot1q 1602 second-dot1q 3655
  rewrite ingress tag pop 1 symmetric
  l2protocol tunnel
  service-policy input PM-CUST-DEFAULT-10M-BD-IN
  service-policy output PM-CUST-DEFAULT-10M-OUT
  xconnect 10.123.114.1 144200001 encapsulation mpls
   mtu 9000

We use this if the other side has a layer 2 CPE that does tunnelling
as well. If the customer is directly connected to a PE we normally use
'l2protocol forward'.

kind regards
Pshem

On 30 October 2013 17:15, Jason Lixfeld <jason at lixfeld.ca<mailto:jason at lixfeld.ca>> wrote:
As far as what I can glean from various configuration guides and other bits of documentation:

ME3600s don't support L2 protocol tunneling on cross-connect EVCs, but they do on port based xconnects or on EVCs where the sp-facing interfaces are trunks; they will forward, tunnel or peer various layer 2 protocols.  Does that include STP variants (RSTP, PVST, R-PVST, MST, EAPS)?  Pause and 802.1x appear to be a part of the MEF CE2.0 spec and it seems the ME3600 is compliant, so I'm presuming these will all work with a port based xconnect?

IOS XR configuration docs that I've found seem to say the platform only supports L2 protocol tunnelling for STP, VTP and CDP.  Is that it?  That seems like a bit of a weak feature set if I'm using something like an A9K as a PE compared to an ME3600.  I read a Cisco presentation from July 2013 that says the A9K is MEF CE2.0 compliant so it should support at least everything the ME3600 supports, but I'd expect to be able to find some sort of configuration guide telling me how to configure these L2PT bits.  Can anyone point me to some docs?

Thanks in advance.

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