Cisco's IOS-XE and PCEP implementation

Sun Apr 5 17:33:46 UTC 2015

On 30 March 2015 at 15:42:59, Mohamed Kamal (mkamal at noor.net) wrote:
> I'm wondering, why there is no MPLS-TE PCE support for IOS-XE till now?!
>  
> Should I be getting a 9k/CRS on the edge to implement an automatic tool
> to build MPLS-TE tunnels!

In general, PCE(P) implementations have been limited. IMHO the last 10 years of RSVP-TE management has generally been done with auto-mesh tools, or in-house driven offline path calculation tools (e.g., WANDL, Cariden, Aria…). 

As such, the demand for online calculation has increased - either due to dependencies for new TE path-instantiating protocols (e.g., SR), or more complex constraints that cannot be well met by offline calculation or CSPF (e.g., path-diversity with disjoint head-end PEs). This demand is mainly coming in higher-scale environments - and hence being implemented on IOS-XR within the Cisco environment today. I expect this is why IOS-XE is lagging. There are certainly requests for support - but as Mark says, you’ll need to interface with your account team to figure out when code will be available for your platform.

As to whether you should buy an IOS XR device for your edge, I’m not sure what kind of logic would mean that device selection is solely based on PCEP support :-). I would certainly look more into the existing “automatic” tools, and possibilities for offline calculation in the interim period.

r.