traceroute through MPLS

traceroute is often used as an effective analysis and troubleshooting tool. It is easily interpreted in a hop by hop routing network. Tracing packets through an MPLS network, however, requires more in-depth understanding of the internetworking between routing and tag switching.

The best place to start is the MPLS PE router. On the PE router, each customer’s VPN is represented by a vrf, in this case vrf “bigco”. Examining routing table for customer’s remote destination network (172.18.0.0), notice its “next hop” is the remote PE (BGP RR address). This may be counter-intuitive that a customer VPN has a next hop in the global routing table (effectively leaping from one vrf to another), but this is precisely where MPLS does its magic.

A_PE1#sho ip route vrf bigco 172.18.0.0

Routing entry for 172.18.0.0/16

…

  Last update from 10.8.0.1 5d18h ago

  Routing Descriptor Blocks:

  * 10.8.0.1 (Default-IP-Routing-Table), from 172.18.127.141, 5d18h ago

…

Sorting out System MAC addresses with VPC and VSS – Part 2

Following Part 1 which starts with VPC on Nexus platform, here VSS on Catalyst is compared side by side.

A simple and interesting topology can be used to illustrate. In this case, Nexus and Catalyst use different multichassis technology (VPC and VSS respectively), forming back to back virtual port channel. The effective logical topology becomes greatly simplified (shown on the right side), with benefits including utilization of full bisectional bandwidth, stable all forwarding STP, high resiliency, and ease of adding/removing physical members etc.

VSS Domain ID is very much similar to VPC Domain ID. It is a unique identifier in the topology, which represents logical virtual switch formed by two physical chassis. Only one VSS pair is associated with a particular domain.