[j-nsp] Segment Routing Real World Deployment (was: VPC mc-lag)

[Mark Tinka]

On 9/Jul/18 01:13, Pavel Lunin wrote:

> And yes, as pseudo-wire data plane is way simpler than VPLS, depending on
> your access network design, you can [try to] extend it end-to-end, all the
> way to the access switch and [maybe, if you are lucky] dramatically
> simplify your NOC's life.

We run MPLS all the way into the access, on ASR920's. So pw's are
end-to-end, and the Provisioning/NOC teams only need to look at the end
boxes. I found the whole idea of centralized "gateways" in the core to
be a bit clunky.


> However p2p pseudo-wire service is a kind of rare thing these days. There
> are [quite a lot of] those poor folks who were never asked whether bridged
> L2 VPN (aka VPLS) is needed in the network, they operate. They have no much
> choice.

This is a number I'd like to, someday, actually qualify. When VPLS was
the buzzword in 2009, everyone was jumping on to it. I'd like to know
how many of those have continued with it, moved over to EVPN, moved to
l3vpn, moved to plain-old Internet or moved to LDP-based p2p and p2mp
solutions.

My previous employer was heavy on VPLS when I joined, using both for
services (to deliver customer VPN's) and a backbone (as an overlay to
carry other traffic). By the time I'd left, we'd moved most VPN services
across to LDP-based p2p/p2mp, and only had the Broadband Subscribe
backhaul running over VPLS (this was before PWHE).


> And yes, switching frames between fancy full-feature PEs is just half of
> the game. The autodiscovery beauty breaks when the frames say bye bye to
> the MPLS backbone and meet the ugly access layer. Now you need to switch it
> down to the end-point and this often ends up in old good^W VLAN
> provisioning. But it's not about BGP, it's about VPLS. Or rather about
> those brave folks, who build their services relying on all these
> ethernet-on-steroid things.

Couldn't agree more.

I know a number of mobile networks that use VPLS as a backbone to handle
their IP data traffic. I've always been curious what that's like to manage.

Mark.