nanog mailing list archives

Re: [c-nsp] LDPv6 Census Check


From: Andrey Kostin <ankost () podolsk ru>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:12:46 -0400

Saku Ytti писал 2020-06-12 12:10:
On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 at 18:52, David Sinn <dsinn () dsinn com> wrote:

Unless you want ECMP then it VERY much matters. But I guess since we are only talking about theoretical instead of building an actual practical network, it doesn't matter.

Well blatantly we are, because in the real world most of the value of
MPLS tunnels is not available as IP tunnels. Again technically
entirely possible to replace MPLS tunnels with IP tunnels, just
question how much overhead you have in transporting the tunnel key and
how wide they are.

Should we design a rational cost-efficient solution, we should choose
the lowest overhead and narrowest working keys.

Sorry for jumping in in the mddle of discussion, as a side note, in case of IPIP tunneling, shouldn't another protocol type be utilized in MAC header? As I understand, in VXLAN VTEP ip is dedicated for this purpose, so receiving a packet with VTEP DST IP already means "decapsulate and lookup the next header". But in traditional routers loopback IPs are used for multiple purposes and usually receiving a packet with lo0 IP means punt it to control plane. Isn't additional differentiator is needed here to tell a router which type of action it has to do? Or, as alternative, if dedicated stack of IPs is used for tunneling, then another lookup table is needed for it, isn't it? And now looks like we are coming to the header structure and forwarding process similar that we already have in MPLS, only with different label format. Please correct me if I went off track somewhere in this logical chain.

To David's point about ECMP I'd like to mention that in WAN networks number of diverse paths is always limited, so having multiple links taking same path doesn't make much sense. With current economics 4x10G and 1x100G are usually close from price POV. Obviously, there are different situations when multiple links are the only option, but how many, usually 4-8. Sure if you need multiple 400G then there is currently no option to go to higher speeds, but that's more DC use case than WAN network. So ECMP in WAN network isn't that big scale problem imho, also there are existing and proposed solutions, like SR, for it.

Kind regards,
Andrey


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