MPLS questions

[ke6guj]

we are looking into upgrading our hub-and-spoke Cisco VPN tunnels at work and are looking into an MPLS solution. Anyone have any experience with them? Does CoS really help? Looking to improve Voice and RDP quality.

[mosinmike]

We switched off a frame relay to MPLS about three years ago and had great luck with it. It is nice to have the cloud feature so if you lose one site the others are still able to communicate with each other. QoS does make a difference, especially with voice traffic. When you set it up with the carrier engineer, expect to spend some time going over the configuration settings with them.

[bigmike82]

MPLS is a great solution if you can spend the time and money to do it right.

While I don't run MPLS, some of my customers do in their networks, and it seems to be a great solution for them.

How bad is your voice quality now? How much budget do you have to play with? If you're site to site links aren't performing at your expectation, a WAN accelerator might be a good option as well. This probably won't help with your voice, but will help with file transfers, RDP, emails, and so forth.

[ibanezfoo]

we are looking into upgrading our hub-and-spoke Cisco VPN tunnels at work and are looking into an MPLS solution. Anyone have any experience with them? Does CoS really help? Looking to improve Voice and RDP quality.

Yes. CoS really helps as long as you have it programmed correctly. We run a non-managed MPLS (meaning I have to program all the routers and stuff myself) network through Sprint. If you go with a solution like this you have to make sure your provider matches your CoS stuff on your end for whatever equipment you are using. We use Smoothstone for VOIP stuff so I just used the CoS profiles they recommend. With a setup like that you either have to VLAN it or use a separate network because you have to NAT it to them through your MPLS cloud, easier if you have two interfaces on your router. Sprint won't let you do this with anything less than Cisco 2800 routers for any kind of multilink circuits.

We use to use hub and spoke VPNs, then hub and spoke point to point lines, and then MPLS. We've been running this for 5 or 6 years now. If you are handy with router programming I'd recommend using an un-managed service and doing the BGP stuff yourself. Saves you some money too. We had Telepacific managed MPLS for awhile but ditched them... it takes forever to get something simple like a route changed and half the time they'd mess it up anyway. I can plop into a router and fix stuff on the fly.

Issues you run into... This stuff ain't cheap. Whoever your provider is still has to rely on the last mile carriers, so all the promises about reliability you have to toss out unless they own the actual cable (and Sprint seems to own nothing... its all Verizon and AT&T out here). The provider also might not contract with all available local carriers... for example, we had Time Warner drop in a scalable (to 10 gig) fiber internet line FOR FREE (they installed all the conduit, everything... and did an awesome job). We thought, awesome, lets get another one and run our MPLS through it... no go. No connection with Sprint. Best we could to was a $30k to install DS3 from AT&T. Make sure your provider knows which location(s) have internet so they can route things properly, and make sure they weight it properly. You still have to program all the BGP stuff on your side though... Diversify your circuits if you can. Just because AT&T owns the last mile, if you are using more than one circuit don't let them install all the circuits from the same cable. If somebody digs up a line or something you can still stay up and running on less circuits if they aren't all coming from the same place. They will tell you they can't do it but they are lying. %50 capacity is still better than %0 capacity.

[ke6guj]

MPLS is a great solution if you can spend the time and money to do it right.

While I don't run MPLS, some of my customers do in their networks, and it seems to be a great solution for them.

How bad is your voice quality now? How much budget do you have to play with? If you're site to site links aren't performing at your expectation, a WAN accelerator might be a good option as well. This probably won't help with your voice, but will help with file transfers, RDP, emails, and so forth.

voice quality is decent right now since we have a PPP line between the local offices that i route the VoIP traffic through, but when it is goes through the VPN it is poor. VoIP traffic to the Chicago office (2-3 lines max at a time) is staticy, but acceptable. VoIP to the mexico office is almost unusable since we can't rely on a decent route (ping times will go from 150-200ms to over 500ms randomly, depending on which path I get). RDP from mexico isn't normally bad, but when you have a .5 second delay on each keystroke, it is not good.

I'll have to look into WAN acceleration.

Yes. CoS really helps as long as you have it programmed correctly. We run a non-managed MPLS (meaning I have to program all the routers and stuff myself) network through Sprint. If you go with a solution like this you have to make sure your provider matches your CoS stuff on your end for whatever equipment you are using. We use Smoothstone for VOIP stuff so I just used the CoS profiles they recommend. With a setup like that you either have to VLAN it or use a separate network because you have to NAT it to them through your MPLS cloud, easier if you have two interfaces on your router. Sprint won't let you do this with anything less than Cisco 2800 routers for any kind of multilink circuits.

I can do a little bit of the programming, I got help setting up the first 2 VPN tunnels and how to hub-spoke them, and now I can add/remove tunnels as I need. I could probably pick up the MPLS programming pretty quick once I see it. Most of our routers are 2811's, so that should be fine.

Issues you run into... This stuff ain't cheap. Whoever your provider is still has to rely on the last mile carriers, so all the promises about reliability you have to toss out unless they own the actual cable (and Sprint seems to own nothing... its all Verizon and AT&T out here). The provider also might not contract with all available local carriers... for example, we had Time Warner drop in a scalable (to 10 gig) fiber internet line FOR FREE (they installed all the conduit, everything... and did an awesome job). We thought, awesome, lets get another one and run our MPLS through it... no go. No connection with Sprint. Best we could to was a $30k to install DS3 from AT&T. Make sure your provider knows which location(s) have internet so they can route things properly, and make sure they weight it properly. You still have to program all the BGP stuff on your side though... Diversify your circuits if you can. Just because AT&T owns the last mile, if you are using more than one circuit don't let them install all the circuits from the same cable. If somebody digs up a line or something you can still stay up and running on less circuits if they aren't all coming from the same place. They will tell you they can't do it but they are lying. %50 capacity is still better than %0 capacity.[/QUOTE]I'm talking with Verizon, Sprint, and ATT. Local lines here are Verizon, In Chicago, they are ATT, Telmex in Mexico, and I don't know who will be servicing the new office in Texas. I'm assuming that if I go with one of the big three, even if the last mile at a location isn't provided by them, that they will be able to get stuff done faster than a 3rd party MPLS reseller.

[vonderplatz]

If you are in a bind you maybe able to do this as a stop gap measure.


class-map match-any ef
match dscp ef
class-map match-any cs3
match dscp cs3
class-map match-any anydscp
match any
!
!
policy-map voice-policy
class ef
priority 512
class cs3
bandwidth 128
class class-default
fair-queue
policy-map cleardscp
class anydscp
set ip dscp default

One of my clients is an Observatory on top of a Mountain, and we have had no problems with VoIP, and they are heavy bandwidth hogs especially at night. The secret though is separating the traffic as much as you can making VoIP (signal and voice) priority and everything else Best Effort.

I work on a large network and don't know what you are supporting, but MPLS is not a quick weekend read.

[ibanezfoo]

I can do a little bit of the programming, I got help setting up the first 2 VPN tunnels and how to hub-spoke them, and now I can add/remove tunnels as I need. I could probably pick up the MPLS programming pretty quick once I see it. Most of our routers are 2811's, so that should be fine.

You have to make sure your routers have the proper firmware supporting BGP if you want to use it (I recommend you do)... Other than that there isn't much to it. Each location will have a variation of this:

interface GigabitEthernet0/0
ip address y.y.y.y 255.255.252.0
ip helper-address z.z.z.z
duplex full
speed auto
no mop enabled
!
service-policy output VOIP1

interface Serial1/0
ip address x.x.x.78 255.255.255.252
no ip proxy-arp
dsu bandwidth 18000
scramble
serial restart-delay 0
no cdp enable
!
service-policy output VOIP1
!
router bgp 99999
no synchronization
bgp log-neighbor-changes
network x.x.x.0 mask 255.255.255.252
redistribute connected
redistribute static
neighbor x.x.x.77 remote-as 55555
neighbor x.x.x.77 default-originate
no auto-summary

Our voip policies are a little different (and shouldn't be assigned to both interfaces I know... but this is what they wanted, so...) :

class-map match-all precedence4
match ip dscp af31
match ip dscp af32
class-map match-all precedence5
match ip precedence 5
match ip dscp ef
class-map match-any ipcos-prec2
match precedence 2
!
!
policy-map VOIP1
class precedence5
priority
police rate percent 35
class precedence4
bandwidth percent 25
class ipcos-prec2
bandwidth percent 15

Basically the backside of your router is on the BGP cloud and the front side is just normal. It will automatically push the routes from the local network into the cloud and you can also publish static routes if you need to. Easy peezy