[c-nsp] Cisco Nexus as MetroE switch?

[Mark Tinka]

On 18/Oct/15 08:42, Nathan Ward wrote:

> I’ve heard this about the label depth limitation. It’s not clear to me what this means in practice - the max depth is 3 labels, but, does that mean it can’t forward packets with more than 3 labels, or does this mean that only certain features (perhaps hashing for load balancing across multiple physicals in a bundle) can happen with 3 or less labels? The latter makes sense, the former seems kind of odd.
> I know that there is a limitation where flow labels cannot be used, and where it won’t load-balance across multiple paths. We do TE, and if we need to we’ll load balance across multiple tunnels at the head end, so I can’t see that being relevant either - it’s just another TE path from the ACX point of view.
>
> We’re also not doing more than 3 labels, so I’m not worried, but curious about what the limitation actually means.
>
> If you have any info on that I’d love to hear it - we can move that discussion to j-nsp though perhaps :-)

Public information about Broadcom's MPLS support is scanty.

When we asked Juniper to specifically confirm NG-MVPN support on the
ACX5000, they confirmed the chip won't do it due to the label stack
required to support basic NG-MVPN, and also if you add things like FRR
for the NG-MVPN construct, if the router is a bud node or branch device
in the tree, e.t.c.

This isn't the first time I heard it, as I know a certain BU within
Cisco decided to drop the Broadcom chip idea for their next generation
platform due to the exact same limitation.

However, Rosen Multicast will work fine on the Broadcom; it is NG-MVPN
which won't. Not sure about BIER.

> Sure. In my environment we’re doing simple ethernet pseudowires, without anything fancy so I expect it will behave just fine for that - that is the core metro-e feature, really.

Still, I'd test before buying. Just dump your current Juniper
configurations on to the thing and see what happens.

Mark.