Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

 
 

Configuring the FAT Flow Label for FEC 129 VPLS Pseudowires for Load-Balancing MPLS Traffic

This topic shows how to configure flow-aware transport of pseudowires (FAT) flow labels for forwarding equivalence class (FEC) 129 virtual private LAN service (VPLS) pseudowires for load-balancing MPLS traffic.

Before you begin:

  1. Configure the device interfaces and enable MPLS on all the interfaces.

  2. Configure MPLS and an LSP from the ingress provider edge (PE) router to the remote PE router.

  3. Configure IBGP sessions between the PE routers.

  4. Configure an interior gateway protocol (IGP) on the PE router and provider (P) routers.

  5. Configure the circuits between the PE routers and the customer edge (CE) routers.

  6. Configure LDP on all the interfaces.

FAT flow labels enable load-balancing of MPLS packets across equal-cost multipath (ECMP) paths or link aggregation groups (LAGs) without the need for deep packet inspection of the payload. FAT flow labels can be used for LDP-signaled FEC 128 and FEC 129 pseudowires for VPLS and virtual private wire service (VPWS) networks.

You can configure FAT flow labels to be signaled by LDP on FEC 129 VPLS pseudowires by including the flow-label-transmit and flow-label-receive configuration statements at the [edit routing-instances instance-name protocols vpls] hierarchy level. This configuration sets the T bit and R bit advertisement to 1 (the default being 0) in the Sub-TLV field, which is part one of the interface parameters of the FEC for the LDP label-mapping message header. This configuration is applicable for all the pseudowires providing full mesh connectivity from the VPLS routing instance to all its neighbors.

To configure the FAT flow label for an FEC 129 VPLS pseudowire, on the ingress PE router:

  1. Configure the FEC 129 VPLS routing instance.
  2. Configure the routing instance to signal the capability to push the flow label in the transmit direction to the remote PE router.
  3. Configure the routing instance to signal the capability to pop the flow label in the receive direction to the remote PE router.
  4. Verify and commit the configuration.

    For example:

  5. Repeat the configuration on the remote egress PE router.