Re: 10G CPE w/VXLAN - vendors?

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 6/19/23 02:10, Patrick Cole wrote:

> Ciena has supported MPLS-TE on this platform for a long time not just 
> TP.    Back 15+ years ago, I buit such a network.  At the time, the 
> code was extremely green, did not support FRR, only active/standby 
> LSPs.    Although it appeared to work fine in the lab environment, 
> when stress tested under extreme rolling BFD flap events in our field 
> microwave network, the SW fell apart with control plane data 
> corruption and associated HW misprogramming.  The vendors answer to 
> debugging and diagnosis was to crontab bcm debug commands and pipe it 
> over the network with netcat due to lack of even support for remote 
> syslog;  I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.   Ripped everything and 
> replaced with Cisco ASR, and never slept better.

That's been the general theme with operators who are traditionally Layer 
1 or Layer 2 service providers, looking to dabble into packet switching. 
It often makes sense for them to speak to their Transport vendor, as 
their gear is already an installed base.

Two or so years later, those operators will be ripping those Transport 
boxes out and replacing them with more traditional packet switching 
gear, as you did as well.

Transport vendors continue to push their boxes as being MPLS-capable 
routers. It tends to be a "tick the box that we had that conversation 
this new year, make it last at least 3 seconds, and then carry on with 
real talk" situation :-).

Mark.