Troubleshooting tips for MPLS

Last week we wrapped up the MPLS bootcamp, and it was a blast!   A big shout out to all the students who attended,  as well as to many of the INE staff who stopped by (you know who you are :)).    Thank you all.

Here is the topology we used for the class, as we built the network, step by step.

The class was organized and delivered in 30 specific lessons. Here is the "overview" slide from class:

One of the important items we discussed was troubleshooting.   When we understand all the components of Layer3 VPNs, the troubleshooting is easy.   Here are the steps:

• Can PE see CE’s routes?
• Are VPN routes going into MP-BGP?  (The Export)
• Are remote PEs seeing the VPN routes?
• Are remote PEs inserting the VPN routes into the correct local VRF? (The Import)
• Are remote PEs, advertising these to remote CEs?
• Are the remote CEs seeing the routes?

We had lots of fun, and included wireshark protocol analysis, so we could see and verify what we were learning.   Here is one example, of a BGP updated from a downstream iBGP neighbor which includes the VPN label:

If you missed the class, but still want to benefit from it, we have recorded all 30 sessions, and it is available as an on-demand version of the class.

Next week, the BGP bootcamp is running, so if you need to  brush up on BGP, we will be covering the following topics, also  in 30, easy to digest lessons:

• Monitoring and Troubleshooting BGP
• Multi-Homed BGP Networks
• AS-Path Filters
• Prefix-List Filters
• Outbound Route Filtering
• Route-Maps as BGP Filters
• BGP Path Attributes
• BGP Local Preference
• BGP Multi-Exit-Discriminator (MED)
• BGP Communities
• BGP Customer Multi-Homed to a Single Service Provider
• BGP Customer Multi-Homed to Multiple Service Providers
• Transit Autonomous System Functions
• Packet Forwarding in Transit Autonomous Systems
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting IBGP in Transit AS
• Network Design with Route Reflectors
• Limiting the Number of Prefixes Received from a BGP Neighbor
• AS-Path Prepending
• BGP Peer Group
• BGP Route Flap Dampening
• Troubleshooting Routing Issues
• Scaling BGP

I look forward to seeing you in class!

Best wishes in all of your learning.