Author: Fahadi Muhumuza

In a network where Service Providers run customers’ VLAN traffic over their backbone network, there is a possibility of VLAN crushing if different customers use overlapping VLAN IDs. With Q-in-Q Tunneling Providers can segregate different customers’ VLAN traffic on a link (for example, if the customers use overlapping VLAN IDs) or bundle different customer VLANs into a single service VLAN.

With Q-in-Q tunneling, providers can segregate or bundle customer traffic into fewer VLANs or different VLANs by adding another layer of 802.1Q tags. Q-in-Q tunneling is useful when customers have overlapping VLAN IDs because the customer’s 802.1Q (dot1Q) VLAN tags are prepended by the service VLAN (S-VLAN) tag.

This makes it a suitable solution for service providers since it gives them freedom on which S-VLANs to use without changing customers’ C-VLANs and customers can use any VLANs they want.

How Q-in-Q Tunneling Works

In Q-in-Q tunneling, as a packet travels from a customer VLAN (C-VLAN) to a service provider’s VLAN (S-VLAN), a customer-specific 802.1Q tag (Customer’s S-VLAN tag) is added to the packet. This additional tag is used to segregate traffic into service-provider-defined service VLANs (S-VLANs). The original customer 802.1Q tag (C-VLAN(s) tag(s)) of the packet remains and is transmitted transparently, passing through the service provider’s network. As the packet leaves the S-VLAN in the downstream direction, the extra 802.1Q tag (Customer’s S-VLAN tag) is removed.

This solution has been illustrated on a Juniper EX-2300-C Switch with Enhanced Layer 2 Software (ELS) support.

There are multiple ways Q-in-Q tunneling maps C-VLAN(s) to S-VLAN(s).

1. All-in-one bundling
2. Many-to-one bundling
3. Many-to-many bundling
4. Mapping a specific interface

In this tutorial, only “All-in-one bundling” will be covered.

Continue reading “Q-in-Q Tunneling for ELS support on Juniper Switches” →

Virtual private LAN service (VPLS) multihoming enables you to connect a customer site to two or more PE routers to provide redundant connectivity. A redundant PE router can provide network service to the customer site as soon as a failure is detected. VPLS multihoming helps to maintain VPLS service and traffic forwarding to and from the multihomed site in the event of the following types of network failures:

• PE router to CPE device link failure
• PE router failure
• MPLS-reachability failure between the local PE router and a remote PE router

Ideally, each customer should have dedicated physical connections to PEs, but this kind of setup is expensive for service providers to maintain. Therefore, a new approach of Sub Rings connecting different customers with the use of different VLAN-IDs has been lately utilized as shown below. This makes each CPE logically appear as if it’s connected directly to PEs.

However, VPLS Multihoming was designed to detect failures when the physical interface it’s running on goes down and with this kind of setup, if CPE-2 is multihomed between PE-01 and PE-02 as primary and backup respectively, and the link between CPE-2 and CPE-1 goes down, PE-01 will not notice that failure, therefore, VPLS multihoming will not failover to PE-02 and hence fail-over will not be achieved.

In this blog, we shall cover the set up and configuration of VPLS Multihoming with BGP signaling in a Sub-ring scenario to address the challenge mentioned above.

Continue reading “VPLS Multihoming in a Sub-ring setup using rpm and event-handlers for Juniper” →