Definitive MPLS Network Designs

Product Description

Field-proven MPLS designs covering MPLS VPNs, pseudowire, QoS, traffic engineering, IPv6, network recovery, and multicast

• Understand technology applications in various service provider and enterprise topologies via detailed design studies
• Benefit from the authors’ vast experience in MPLS network deployment and protocol design
• Visualize real-world solutions through clear, detailed illustrations
• Design studies cover various operator profiles including an interexchange carrier (IXC), a national telco deploying a multiservice backbone carrying Internet and IP VPN services as well as national telephony traffic, an international service provider with many POPs all around the globe, and a large enterprise relying on Layer-3 VPN services to control communications within and across subsidiaries
• Design studies are thoroughly explained through detailed text, sample configurations, and network diagrams

Definitive MPLS Network Designs provides examples of how to combine key technologies at the heart of IP/MPLS networks. Techniques are presented through a set of comprehensive design studies. Each design study is based on characteristics and objectives common to a given profile of network operators having deployed MPLS and discusses all the corresponding design aspects.

The book starts with a technology refresher for each of the technologies involved in the design studies. Next, a series of design studies is presented, each based on a specific hypothetical network representative of service provider and enterprise networks running MPLS. Each design study chapter delivers four elements. They open with a description of the network environment, including the set of supported services, the network topology, the POP structure, the transmission facilities, the basic IP routing design, and possible constraints. Then the chapters present design objectives, such as optimizing bandwidth usage. Following these are details of all aspects of the network design, covering VPN, QoS, TE, network recovery, and—where applicable—multicast, IPv6, and pseudowire. The chapters conclude with a summary of the lessons that can be drawn from the design study so that all types of service providers and large enterprise MPLS architects can adapt aspects of the design solution to their unique network environment and objectives.

Although network architects have many resources for seeking information on the concepts and protocols involved with MPLS, there is no single resource that illustrates how to design a network that optimizes their benefits for a specific operating environment. The variety of network environments and requirements makes it difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all design recommendation. Definitive MPLS Network Designs fills this void.

“This book comes as a boon to professionals who want to understand the power of MPLS and make full use of it.”

-Parantap Lahiri, Manager, IP Network Infrastructure Engineering, MCI

Includes a FREE 45-Day Online Edition

This book is part of the Networking Technology Series from Cisco Press®, which offers networking professionals valuable information for constructing efficient networks, understanding new technologies, and building successful careers.

Links

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Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful Case Studies and Straw Men, May 23, 2005 By  A. Sardella (Sunnyvale, CA United States) - See all my reviews    This review is from: Definitive MPLS Network Designs (Hardcover) Why is MPLS being implemented so widely? To get your arms around this, you need to divide the question somewhat, and take a look at the different flavors of service providers and carriers that are building MPLS networks. In Definitive MPLS Network Designs, the authors have created strawmen for an Interexchange Carrier (USCom), a National Telco (Telecom Kingland), a Global Service Provider (Globenet), and a monstrously large enterprise (EuroBank-which seems to have swallowed up so many other European banks as to be a kind of virtual service provider in its own right). All four of these mythical entities build Layer 3 MPLS services, but they each have different requirements for QoS, restoration, traffic engineering, and other services provided by MPLS. USCom is a long distance voice service provider who needs very fast (telco quality) recovery over unprotected core transport. Telecom Kingland is adding a multiservice backbone that will be trunking public telephony as well as... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment 3 of 4 people found the following review helpful The New WAN Network, May 16, 2005 By  Joel E. Natt (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews    This review is from: Definitive MPLS Network Designs (Hardcover) Your organization has grown and the simple wide area network (WAN) you are responsible for and familiar with needs to grow to support the needs of that change. Now the WAN is preparing to enter the next generation technology and expand from either a simple point to point and point to multipoint environment to a global diverse cloud environment and you are tasked to learn about this new technology and implement it. Most likely you are in the networking team and/or the architecture group within your organization and it is your job to do this and do it right the first time. The amount of information on new WAN technologies is enormous and ever growing. As anyone in the network world knows various providers will have their solutions and offer numerous products and options, but it will be your job to understand these solutions and advise your management team on the best options available. Thus, you will need to learn and refer to items at various intervals. One of the newer... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment Good Book, December 28, 2012 By  Michel - See all my reviews Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Definitive MPLS Network Designs (paperback) (Networking Technology) (Paperback) Great overview of MPLS, good way to study, recommended read for anyone interested in understanding more about scaling large networks. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment

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Praise For Definitive MPLS Network Designs

Definitive MPLS Network Designs
Reviewer Name: Alan Sardella
Reviewer Certification: CCDP
Rating: ***** out of *****

Why is MPLS being implemented so widely? To get your arms around this, you need to divide the question somewhat, and take a look at the different flavors of service providers and carriers that are building MPLS networks. In Definitive MPLS Network Designs, the authors have created strawmen for an interexchange carrier (USCom), a national telco (Telecom Kingland), a global service provider (Globenet), and a monstrously large enterprise (EuroBank, which seems to have swallowed up so many other European banks as to be a kind of virtual service provider in its own right).

All four of these mythical entities build Layer 3 MPLS services, but they each have different requirements for QoS, restoration, traffic engineering, and other services provided by MPLS. USCom is a long distance voice service provider who needs very fast (telco quality) recovery over unprotected core transport. Telecom Kingland is adding a multiservice backbone that will be trunking public telephony as well as new services such as IPv6 and carrier of carrier services (in which all VPNs from one carrier are trunked in a single VPN across another carrier’s backbone). GlobeNet has unique traffic engineering concerns and a need to create viable peering agreements with local service providers in order to provide services in a shared fashion. Thus, inter-AS Layer 3 VPNs are discussed in detail here. EuroBank, with its vast resources, is building out its own MPLS core to support the variety of access infrastructures it has inherited. Each of these strawmen are described in terms of their design objectives, the services they offer, their topologies, and the constraints that lead to the choices made in building out these networks. Configuration snippets are provided throughout for illustration purposes.

The problem that this book solves is that there really is no one-size-fits-all design for any network technology, and MPLS is no exception. The set of services offered by network operators and enterprises varies greatly from one implementation to the next, and the best you can do is try to scaffold a set of likely use cases and thus provide a starting point for the network designers and engineers that have to take on a unique project.

These case studies all validate the reasons that MPLS has emerged as a way to give you the simplicity and power of Layer 3 networks and still retain everything you loved about your last generation Layer 2 Frame Relay or ATM network—the per-subscriber separation of virtual circuits, robustness against attacks, and the virtualization of the core infrastructure. The real sale in terms of manageability is the ability to maintain only a single converged network instead of many disparate networks. Initially it was the traffic separation capabilities in the form of Layer 3 VPNs that put MPLS on the way to wide acceptance, but with the growth of multimedia traffic and the trends towards advanced network services, the demand for resiliency, restoration and traffic engineering on a scale more commonly associated with optical transport has provided another wide area for MPLS to show its strengths.

Chances are that any network engineer responsible for turning up or maintaining an MPLS network is only going to be responsible for a network resembling one of the reference designs illustrated in this book. But it is well worth browsing all the different implementations to get an idea of the power of MPLS to fit into these different models. Finally, what really drives this book to 5 stars is the comprehensive technology primers it provides before even getting into the case studies. The first chapter is more edge-oriented and provides an excellent backgrounder on MPLS VPN services, as well as multicast, IPv6, and pseudowire. Chapter 2 covers core issues such as the many varieties of MPLS traffic engineering and QoS facilities. These chapters give you most of the hooks you need to hang onto the concepts that are introduced in the case studies, and they provide nice reference material in general to get a feel for these technologies before you go digging through the documentation for implementation specifics.

Definitive MPLS Network Designs
Reviewer Name: Joel E. Natt, Network and Security Administrator
Reviewer Certification: CCNP

Your organization has grown and the simple wide area network (WAN) you are responsible for and familiar with needs to grow to support the needs of that change. Now the WAN is preparing to enter the next generation technology and expand from either a simple point to point and point to multipoint environment to a global diverse cloud environment and you are tasked to learn about this new technology and implement it. Most likely you are in the networking team and/or the architecture group within your organization and it is your job to do this and do it right the first time.

The amount of information on new WAN technologies is enormous and ever growing. As anyone in the network world knows various providers will have their solutions and offer numerous products and options, but it will be your job to understand these solutions and advise your management team on the best options available. Thus, you will need to learn and refer to items at various intervals. One of the newer technologies that is gaining strength in the WAN environment is Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and could be the ideal solution for you. With Definitive MPLS Network Designs you will be able to take the first important step to accomplishing this goal and ensuring that the process and planning is accomplished correctly. When I first looked at this book, I assumed it was nothing more than an enhancement to the concepts of Frame-Relay and point to point connections, but as I ventured further into the book the inclusion of IPv6 information and Network Engineering items proved my initial assumptions where not only incorrect but extremely off base.

This book will not only provide the first step, but also provides the guidance and hand holding to help you navigate the land of uncertainty that is MPLS. As you start reading about MPLS, you will discover that it is a different type of Wide Area Networking. It is an entirely new concept — no more leased T1 lines or frame relay clouds, now the concept of point to multipoint and beyond takes on an entirely different meaning and theory.

Jim Guichard and his fellow authors, François Le Faucheur and Jean-Philippe Vasseur, define not only the concepts like PE (Provider Router) and CE (Client Router) but detail step by step the assembly of the cloud that will be needed to ensure a complete implementation of any MPLS solution. Included are numerous routing features of items like BGP and EIGRP, as well as, features like QoS and multicasting play important parts in the environment that an individual would be building. They further explain the need for interchange between the user environment and the provider environment and the different routing features and procedures that could affect this switch. Within the book, other topics like HSRP and IPv6 are included and detailed. Within only six chapters, the amount of detail and design helps any individual with the basic understanding of WAN technologies optimize and deploy the needed environment.

They say books and real-life meet and sometimes relate, well the timing of this book not only offered a great opportunity to gain further knowledge, but also assistance as I began to deploy and support an MPLS solution for a nationwide project within my organization. The amount of detailed information in the book ensured that all sides of the architecture and design process were covered; thereby, allowing me to deliver and meet the needs of my environment.

The only way both Guichard and Cisco Press could have enhanced this material would have been to include a glossary for a quick reference to the book. Yet even with this, I believe that once again Cisco Press has made available through its large pool of authors a combination of high-end and well-developed material that I believe will help any individual. This book is not only an excellent item for any network individual's library, but should be on the quick grab shelf for many having to understand and support MPLS.

Index

Download - 189 KB -- Index

Table of Contents

Dynamic Traffic Engineering LSP Bandwidth Adjustment

Additional Resizing Parameters

Additional Advantages of Dynamic TE LSP Resizing

TE LSP Path Computation

MPLS Traffic Engineering in North America

MPLS Traffic Engineering in the AsiaPac, EMEA, and South America Regions

Reoptimization of TE LSPs

Traffic Engineering Scaling Aspects

Use of Refresh Reduction

Monitoring TE LSPs

Last-Resort Unconstrained Option

TE Design for ATM Pseudowires

Network Recovery Design

MPLS TE Fast Reroute Design Within Globenet Regions

Failure Detection

Set of Backup Tunnels

Backup Tunnel Constraints

Provisioning the Set of Backup Tunnels

Configuring a Hold-Off Timer

IS-IS Routing Design

Failure of a PE Router Supporting ATM Pseudowires

Network Recovery for IPv6 VPN

Virtual POP Design

Conversion of the Johannesburg POP to a VPOP

Attributes of the Inter-AS TE LSPs

Globenet VPOP Migration Strategy

Path Computation for Inter-AS TE LSPs

Reoptimization of Inter-AS TE LSPs

Routing onto Inter-AS TE LSPs

VPOP QoS Design

Recovery of Inter-AS TE LSPs

Policy Control at ASBR Boundaries

Africa Telecom VPOP

Design Lessons to Be Taken from Globenet

Chapter 6               Large Enterprise Design Study

EuroBank’s Network Environment

Description of the Branch Office

Description of an Office Location

Description of a Core Network POP

Description of the Data Centers

Description of the Metro Connections in the UK

EuroBank Design Objectives

EuroBank Network Core Routing Design

Host Routing

Layer 3 MPLS VPN Service Design

Intersubsidiary and DataCenter Connectivity Requirements

Office Location Requirements

EuroBank Group VPN Definitions

Route Target and Route Distinguisher Allocation

Data Center Layer 3 MPLS VPN Design

POP Layer 3 MPLS VPN Design

Core MP-BGP Design

UK Office Location Layer 3 MPLS VPN Design

Routing Within Each Multi-VRF VRF

EuroBank Multicast Deployment and Design

EuroBank Brokerage Encryption Deployment and Design

Layer 3 MPLS VPN Design for VoIP

Architecture of the Managed Telephony Service

On-Net Voice Call Within a EuroBank VPN

On-Net Voice Call Across Two EuroBank VPNs

Layer 3 MPLS VPN Design Within PhoneNet and EuroBank Off-Net Voice Calls

Quality of Service Design

EuroBank’s Service Classes

Traffic Classification in Offices and Data Centers

Sub-100-Mbps QoS Policy

100+Mbps QoS Policy

Gigabit Ethernet Link QoS Policy

QoS Design on the Access for Branches

Traffic Flowing from a Branch

Traffic Flowing to a Branch

Design Lessons to Be Taken from EuroBank

Appendix A             References

Index_                               

Downloadable Sample Chapter

Download - 1.09 MB -- Chapter 3: Interexchange Carrier Design Study