MPLS VPNs or not?

Tue Aug 7 15:47:50 UTC 2001

On 8/7/2001 at 15:14:02 +0100, Randy Bush said:
> 
> > Take a look at the mpls at uu.net archives for a rather exhaustive and
> > exhausting discussion of this very subject, or provide facts as to what
> > specifically doesn't scale.
> 
> to paraphrase vijay, if dealing with one rib is a major discussion in the
> operator and ietf communities, how many thousands of them do you think a
> prudent operator wants to deal with in 2547?

And on some agricultural list somewhere, they're discussing the proper
way to raise a sheep.  If there's all that discussion about how to
raise one sheep, who wants to deal with a flock?  Once you know how to
deal with one big table, dealing with a bunch of tiny, simple tables
is pretty easy, especially since, once you build them, they mainly
take care of themselves.

This really isn't that much to it, folks.  If you're very brave and
very careful, you can let your customers handle their routes.
Otherwise, you can statically route to them.  If you don't want to
handle all those routes in your VPN networks, how many more plain IP
customers are you going to handle?  Configuring routing for an RFC
2547 MPLS VPN is not really much harder than configuring a plain IP
customer.  It can certainly be automated just as easily.

Perhaps the issue here is, the folks arguing against the complexity
are targeting their arguments on the people who really don't need to
worry about it: the small network operators, who have a small support
staff trying to run a BGP-enabled network.  These guys might be MPLS
VPN customers, but there's no need for them to be providers.  To leech
another person's metaphor here, the argument is that a 747 is too hard
for your average pilot to fly.  Fortunately, your average pilot
doesn't have to fly it.

-Dave