Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

Because NetCraftsmen is now offering a free 30 dial trial of Netcordia's NetMRI software (at Netcordia NetMRI 4 Trial Download), we have had some recent discussions on the best way to run a trial.

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I've run into some interesting situations in working with customer VPNs. I am hoping a couple of them might be of general interest, and so will discuss them in this blog / article.

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I've recently been doing a lot of consulting work involving variations on a common theme. The general theme is how do I configure my routers to work with the MPLS VPN service I have bought or am about to buy from Provider X. If the service is to be your sole WAN connection, there's little problem or complexity. Do get the carrier to hand routes off to you in your IGP, unless you happen to want EBGP in your life. If you are going to have two WAN connections, well, things can get more interesting. Which is what this article is about. 

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I've been reading and re-reading various Cisco documents, looking for clarity about Non-Stop Forwarding / High Availability / Resiliency and how it interacts with Fast Re-Routing. To some extent, the more I read, the more puzzled I got. The explanations of each topic are pretty good. How they interact, good but apparently a little incomplete. 

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One of my friends asked me recently if he had too much redundancy. He was concerned about potential issues in having multiple equal cost paths from his Unified Communications Manager to his IP phones, and between IP phones in different locations. (In his case, he is running EIGRP and has up to 4 equal cost paths.)

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I think I have a love / hate relationship going with the Cisco 6500 Sup720-10G module ports. On the one hand, they're darn handy and cost-effective. On the other hand, they represent one more set of one-off gotchas that make the whole 6500 complex. I won't say unnecessarily complex, but definitely taxing to track the idiosynracies of, the capabilities and limitations of the various modules, etc. Bleeding edge technology (or what once was), cost effective, however it seems like it could all be a lot more user friendly. (Take QoS for example ... but that's another rant.)

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I am posting the PDF of a presentation I prepared for the Business IPv6 Exchange on Tuesday 1/26/2010. The contents represent my thoughts together with what I found after conducting light research ("Google") about the topic -- to see if anyone had anything to say on the subject that fell outside what I knew or considered relevant.

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A previous article took a look at Port-Based EoMPLS on a 6500. See http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/blogs/working-with-eompls.html?blogger=Pete+Welcher. In particular, the MTU and LDP (MPLS label protocol) setup is discussed there. It is not repeated with the configlets below.

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Part 2 of my experiments with VRF-Lite, which provides more thoughts on whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. (Part 1 is available here CE Design Options When Using VRF-Lite End-to-End, and discusses using the CE as a "fusion" router to support dynamic routing the customer routing process(es) with the shared service VRFs by using multiple EIGRP processes on the CE without any VRFs.)

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I've been testing some end-to-end VRF-Lite configurations, and I've been thinking about whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. Like many design choices in networking, the decision to run VRFs on your CE devices depends on your application and your network.

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