Service Provider

Practical OTV

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This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v.

I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved.

A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature.

As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend.

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS.

The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s.

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD).

IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis.

This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers.

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network.

LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection.

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics.

Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating.

There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

I have a lot of non-technical related projects in the pipeline, but study wise, whats next up for me is the IOS XR specialist exam.

I think the blueprint for it looks interesting and it provides a way for me to learn more about IOS XR.

Its been a long time since my last update. I apologise for this. It wasnt my intention, it just sort of happened.

In the meantime I have tried the CCIE SP lab and didnt pass it, so I am still studying for my next attempt which is comming up shortly.

The CSNP on multiaccess networks

The CSNP (Complete Sequence Number PDU) on multi-access networks is being sent out on behalf of the DIS (Designated Intermediate System), which acts as the pseudonode representing the multi-access network. Its being used as ISIS’s way of making sure everybody on the multi-access network is up to date. If thats not the case, the node which is missing some routing information can use PSNP (Partial Sequence Number PDU)’s to request the missing information from the DIS.

In this short post i want to try and shed some light on a couple of ISIS timers that had me confused at first. I think i got them down now, but please let me know if i have misunderstood them.

This morning I booked my first go with the CCIE Service Provider lab exam. The battle is in mid November, so I have some time to study.

That also means that alot of forthcomming blog posts will be about CCIE SP material.

In this post i would like to explain the usage of the “MPLS VPN Per VRF Label” feature.

By default, in each VRF, prefixes are assigned a VPN label, used to identify the route within the VRF itself.

This label is the only label that is being looked at by the receiving PE router.

“All that matters, is where you are going” is a favorite quote of mine.

With that an update as well as a plan to move forward.

I have now finished Narbik’s Volume 2 Service Provider workbook. It took a little while longer than I had planned. This is mainly because i took some time off during the holidays (well, studied less at least 🙂 ).

I have now finished the Narbik Volume 1 labs.

It took about 2,5 weeks to do. Im planning on spending a bit more time on the Volume 2 labs. Maybe about 3-4 weeks. I want to make sure i got all the foundational stuff down before advancing to some more complex labs.

In this short piece i would like to show how Frame-Relay PVC bundles work.

A PVC bundle is exactly what the name says. Its a bundle of PVC’s, with each PVC handling a certain Precedence, MPLS EXP or DSCP.

A requirement for the PVC bundle is that all IP Precedence or DSCP values will be handled by one of the PVC’s, so you need to set the “default” PVC unless

Just wanted to let you know of a good place to go for some IOS-XR training.

Head on over to FryGuy’s place:

http://www.fryguy.net/2012/11/06/ios-xr-cisco-videos-and-training/

I have recertified by doing the SP written exam.

Took me a while, but now its done.

My plan is to hit the labs, starting with Narbik’s SP workbook, working my way through that one. That should keep me occupied for quite a while.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the Class-Based Tunnel Selection feature.

In class-based tunnel selection, we will select an MPLS TE tunnel based on the incomming Precedence bit in the data.

For example, IP Prec 5 goes to TE Tunnel 1, whereas IP Prec 3 goes to TE Tunnel 2.

In this post i would like to demonstrate the concept of a well known MPLS TE (Traffic Engineering) feature, known as Fast Reroute.

Fast Reroute, as the name implies, is used to create an MPLS network, that has similar convergence properties of SONET/SDH APS of about 50 ms.

One of the cool things about MPLS is its versatility.

In this post i will show how its possible for a service provider to support legacy frame-relay installations without actually having any frame-relay switches.

I will establish an MPLS core and show how a customer with three sites, one hub site and two spoke sites, will never even know that the core is running MPLS and not end-to-end frame-relay.

I have ordered the first batch of books for the CCIE SP track.

They are:

• Traffic Engineering with MPLS
• Cisco IOS-XR Fundamentals
• MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies
• MPLS Configuration on Cisco IOS Software

I was hoping that you could get them all as eBooks, but as it turns out, i can get some of them as eBooks through Kindle and some through Cisco Press PDF’s and others i could only get as hard copies. This is not the ideal solution.

The cat is out of the bag.

I am going for my 2nd CCIE. This time its in the Service Provider track.

For a while i have felt something missing. And what is missing is a clear cut direction on what i want to learn more about in my professional life.

There’s news on INE’s Service Provider material.

Updated workbooks for the SPv3 will be arriving “soon”. Hopefully that means within a month or two.

If you are interested, you can read more and even get a peak into a sample lab.