The MPLS-OPS Archive

["Vinod Anthony Joseph Cherunni" <vac@antarix.biz>]

Dear All,

If i am going to offer MPLS based VPN's (Intranet & Internet access) on Ethernet catering to say a huge complex shared by multiple customers, which eventually will terminate on my ethernet aggregation switch (part of the same multi-access LAN). Which of the below given methods would be the  best way of provisioning the same.

1. Dedicate a physical ethernet port on my PE router for each customer connection, & use GRE tunnels (1 for Intranet, & 1 for Internet access), wherein the CE GRE connection would use the IP allocated on the dedicated ethernet port on the PE as the GRE tunnel destination. So each CE gets a physcial port dedicated on the PE router.

2. Use a single physical Ethernet port on the PE, & build GRE tunnels from all the CPE into the same physcial port. My experience in such a scenario has been that each GRE tunnel built from a single physical ethernet port, on both the PE & CE routers, needs an independent physical IP address bound to it. This makes one allocate 1 IP address on the physical ethernet port per GRE tunnel, using secondary addresses.

Kindly advise,

With warm regards,

Vinod.