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Customer Edge Devices

Figure 127 shows four customer edge (CE) devices: CE 1, CE 2, CE 3, and CE 4. Each CE device is located at the edge of a customer site, and participates in one or more VPLS domains. In the sample topology, CE 1 and CE 3 are members of the VPLS A domain, and CE 2 and CE 4 are members of the VPLS B domain.

A CE device can be a single host, a switch, or, most typically, a router. Each CE device is directly connected to a VPLS edge router by means of an Ethernet or bridged Ethernet network interface, but does not run VPLS. From the perspective of the CE device, the entire VPLS network appears to be a single layer 2 switch that can switch layer 2 packets, learn and filter on media access control (MAC) addresses, and flood packets that have unknown MAC destination addresses (DAs).

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