AFK, so can't write a well-formed comment :(

but in short, my personal experience was that circuit-like transports play well 
as *augmentation* to shortest-path / ecmp / longest-prefix match techniques, 
not as a complete replacement (after all, ip already works). Mpls circuits are 
alright if you have network asymmetry and need to work around it, but in 
symmetric topologies they seem rather unnecessary, unless you really want to 
have end-to-end uniform data plane, which has both downsides and benefits.

Robert and I had some discussions around pure mpls / seamless mpls DC + DCI 
networks a couple of years ago, but it was hard to find a strong selling point 
for mpls (I was arguing for mpls, btw). In general, MPLS offers uniform, 
protocol agnostic forwarding plane, with simple lookup, but the latter is not 
such a big win with modern (and upcoming) silicon. Next, for entropy reasons it 
is often necessary to resort to leaky abstractions with mpls  (eg nibble 
guessing) or add complications (entropy label), which makes the architecture 
more complicated.

Additionally, I feel that FIB compaction has more to do with network structure 
and careful control of state propagation rather that underlying forwarding 
mechanism. On this side, something that could be achieved with IP via simple 
summarization requires rather sophisticated LSP hierarchies with mpls.

To me, the only good selling point for mpls in DC, in my opinion, is having a 
uniform end to end transport (with corresponding OAM etc). It is not very clear 
whether this has more advantages than downsides, and requires a separate 
discussion :)

Petr

Mar 25, 2015, в 5:00 PM, "Robert Raszuk" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> написал(а):

Hello Luyuan,

Quote:


"The HSDN forwarding architecture in the underlay network isbased on four main 
concepts: 1. Dividing the DC and DCI in ahierarchically-partitioned structure; 
2. Assigning groups ofUnderlay Border Nodes in charge of forwarding within each 
partition; 3. Constructing HSDN MPLS label stacks to identify the end points 
according to the HSDN structure; and 4. Forwarding using the HSDN MPLS labels."


Can you provide any reasoning for going to such complexity when trying to use 
MPLS as transport within and between DCs as compared with using IP based 
transport ? Note that IP based transport native summarization provides 
unquestionable forwarding FIB compression.


Quote:


"HSDN is designed to allow the physical decoupling ofcontrol and forwarding, 
and have the LFIBs configuredby a controller according to a full SDN approach. 
Th controller-centric approach is described in this document."


+

Quote:


"2) The network nodes MUST support MPLS forwarding."



Please kindly note that to the best of my knowledge number of ODMs routers used 
to construct IP CLOS Fabric does not really have control plane which supports 
MPLS transport. Neither distributed nor centrally ie via controller managed.


Quote:


"The key observation is that it is impractical, uneconomical, and
ultimately unnecessary to use a fully connected Clos-based topology in a large 
scale DC."


That is an interesting statement. I think however that one should distinguish 
interconnected regions with proper CLOS fabric from some sort of CLOS fabric 
want-to-be type of topologies. In any case it has no bearing on the main points 
of the scalable interconnect discussion.


- - -


While we could go via number of other comments let's cut it short.


Your draft states that HSDN works with IPv4 transport in the below statement:


Quote:


"Although HSDN can be used with any forwarding technology, including IPv4 and 
IPv6,"


1. Can you summarise reasons what problems do you see with IPv4/IPv6 based 
underlay in the DCs that drove you to provide this document to be based on MPLS 
?


(Note that tenant mobility is the overlay task and nothing to do with underlay.)


2. Can you describe how are you going to distribute MPLS stack to be used for 
forwarding in the underlay to servers ?


3. How are you going to provide efficient ECMP intra-dc ? I see no trace of 
entropy labels in your document.


4. For TE is there anything missing in the below document ?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lapukhov-bgp-sdn-00


Many thx,

r.

_______________________________________________
nvo3 mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/nvo3

Reply via email to