Enterprise - Service Provider

DMVPN — MPLS over DMVPN? Oh yeah.

Get your nerd hats on! We’re freaking pushing labels over our DMVPN network, like a boss. As you might have gathered thus far, I’m a little excited. The only downer here is your label switch path has to be hub-to-spoke, so no mas’ spoke-to-spoke tunnels. If you want labels between your spokes, per Cisco documentation, traffic flow absolutely has to be spoke-hub-spoke. Calm down, dry those tears sunshine… because this is still awesome. I can hear you all now “But Jon! One of the best things about DMVPN is building dynamic tunnels between spokes!” shut up Debbie downer. We do loose dynamic tunnels, but we gain having full blown PEs connected only via DMVPN.

Ok, enough build up. How does this work? Surprisingly easy, if you’ve configured MPLS before… this isn’t going to be super exciting. First things first, here’s our topology:

All spokes are connected back to the hub via Serial links in a 192.168.zy.x/30 space (where z=lower router number, and y=higher router number). For example the link between R1-Hub and R2-Spoke is 192.168.12.0/30. Then we have Loopback0 configured on each router in the 192.168.x.x/32 space, this is our tunnel source. All traffic supporting DMVPN backhaul is routed via OSPF. Finally, for routing within the DMVPN cloud we’re using good old reliable EIGRP. Here’s our base DMVPN configurations.



R1-Hub
 !interface Tunnel100
 ip address 10.10.100.1 255.255.255.0
 no ip redirects
 no ip split-horizon eigrp 100
 ip nhrp map multicast dynamic
 ip nhrp network-id 100
 mpls ip
 tunnel source Loopback0
 tunnel mode gre multipoint

!
!
interface Loopback100

 description BGP peering over DMVPN
 ip address 10.10.1.1 255.255.255.255 

!

 router eigrp 100
 network 10.0.0.0


R2/R3/R4
 interface Tunnel100
 ip address 10.10.100.x 255.255.255.0
 no ip redirects
 ip nhrp map multicast 192.168.1.1
 ip nhrp map 10.10.100.1 192.168.1.1
 ip nhrp network-id 100
 ip nhrp nhs 10.10.100.1
 mpls ip
 tunnel source Loopback0
 tunnel mode gre multipoint

!
interface Loopback100
 description BGP peering over DMVPN
 ip address 10.10.2.2 255.255.255.255

!
router eigrp 100
 network 10.0.0.0

Pretty simple so far right? Alright, lets get some labels in here.



All Routers
mpls ip
mpls ldp router-id lo100
!
int tun100
 mpls ip
!

I know what you’re thinking “Jon, here’s $5… because you just blew my mind.” Well thank you, and I do accept donations. So let’s check the output on R1


*Aug 21 01:21:12.009: %LDP-5-NBRCHG: LDP Neighbor 10.10.2.2:0 (1) is UP
*Aug 21 01:21:13.005: %LDP-5-NBRCHG: LDP Neighbor 10.10.3.3:0 (2) is UP
*Aug 21 01:21:14.106: %LDP-5-NBRCHG: LDP Neighbor 10.10.4.4:0 (3) is UP

Sweet sweet success, but do we have labels? Best place to check is on one of the spokes, I’ll look at R4 (he seems lonely).


R4-MPLS#show mpls forwarding-table | ex No Label
Local      Outgoing   Prefix           Bytes Label   Outgoing   Next Hop   
Label      Label      or Tunnel Id     Switched      interface             
16         Pop Label  10.10.1.1/32     0                  Tu100      10.10.100.1
17         16              10.10.2.2/32     0                  Tu100      10.10.100.1
18         17              10.10.3.3/32     0                  Tu100      10.10.100.1

Awesome! Don’t ignore the next hop, remember that’s the secret sauce here. Since we excluded “no ip next-hop-self eigrp 100” from our Hub config, we’re forcing all traffic between spokes to route through the hub. As I demonstrate in the video, if we allow the dynamic tunnels this all breaks. So we have a functioning LSP it would seem between spokes so lets get some VRF running and go ping crazy! You don’t have to configure BGP on the Hub, but I am and I’ll configure spokes as route reflector clients to minimize spoke configuration.


R1-Hub
router bgp 65000
 bgp log-neighbor-changes
 neighbor 10.10.2.2 remote-as 65000
 neighbor 10.10.2.2 update-source Loopback100
 neighbor 10.10.2.2 send-community both
 neighbor 10.10.3.3 remote-as 65000
 neighbor 10.10.3.3 update-source Loopback100
 neighbor 10.10.3.3 send-community both
 neighbor 10.10.4.4 remote-as 65000
 neighbor 10.10.4.4 update-source Loopback100
 neighbor 10.10.4.4 send-community both
 !
 address-family vpnv4
  neighbor 10.10.2.2 activate
  neighbor 10.10.2.2 send-community extended
  neighbor 10.10.2.2 route-reflector-client
  neighbor 10.10.3.3 activate
  neighbor 10.10.3.3 send-community extended
  neighbor 10.10.3.3 route-reflector-client
  neighbor 10.10.4.4 activate
  neighbor 10.10.4.4 send-community extended
  neighbor 10.10.4.4 route-reflector-client
 exit-address-family


Spokes
router bgp 65000
 bgp log-neighbor-changes
 neighbor 10.10.1.1 remote-as 65000
 neighbor 10.10.1.1 update-source Loopback100
 neighbor 10.10.1.1 send-community both
 !
 address-family vpnv4
  neighbor 10.10.1.1 activate
  neighbor 10.10.1.1 send-community extended
 exit-address-family
 !

Now that we have BGP up and running, we’ll configure a basic VRF, assign a loopback to said VRF and redistribute connected with our ipv4 address-family (for the VRF).


All Spokes
ip vrf MPLS
 rd 65000:1
 route-target export 65000:65000
 route-target import 65000:65000

!
router bgp 65000
 address-family ipv4 vrf MPLS
  redistribute connected
 exit-address-family

R2
int lo1001
 ip vrf f MPLS
 ip address 172.16.2.1 255.255.255.0
!


R3
int lo1001
 ip vrf f MPLS
 ip address 172.16.3.1 255.255.255.0
!


R4
int lo1001
 ip vrf f MPLS
 ip address 172.16.4.1 255.255.255.0
!

Last but not least, let’s test from R3.


R3-MPLS#show ip bgp vpnv4 vrf MPLS | b Route
Route Distinguisher: 65000:1 (default for vrf MPLS)
 *>i 172.16.2.0/24    10.10.2.2                0    100      0 ?
 *>  172.16.3.0/24    0.0.0.0                  0         32768 ?
 *>i 172.16.4.0/24    10.10.4.4                0    100      0 ?

!
R3-MPLS#show ip route vrf MPLS bgp | b Gateway
Gateway of last resort is not set

      172.16.0.0/16 is variably subnetted, 4 subnets, 2 masks
B        172.16.2.0/24 [200/0] via 10.10.2.2, 00:31:16
B        172.16.4.0/24 [200/0] via 10.10.4.4, 00:31:11
!
R3-MPLS#ping vrf MPLS 172.16.2.1 source lo1001
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 172.16.2.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
Packet sent with a source address of 172.16.3.1
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 19/19/20 ms

!
R3-MPLS#traceroute vrf MPLS 172.16.2.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 172.16.2.1
VRF info: (vrf in name/id, vrf out name/id)
  1 10.10.100.1 [MPLS: Labels 16/24 Exp 0] 20 msec 20 msec 20 msec
  2 172.16.2.1 20 msec 19 msec 20 msec

Well that’s it every body! MPLSoDMVPN! See attached video if you want to hear me talk really fast about doing everything you just read.

0 Comments on “DMVPN — MPLS over DMVPN? Oh yeah.

  1. Hi folks,

    Spoke-spoke support with MPLS over DMVPN has been there on IOS-XE routers since XE3.11 and the equivalent release for ISR-G2 routers(those that support MPLS) as well. The routing design stays pretty much the same, the only config that would change is replacing 'mpls ip' on the tunnel interfaces with 'mpls nhrp'. That takes care of all the magic and also doesn't need LDP. So you can disable LDP over the tunnel if you're using that. That's all!

  2. I read up on that as well! (Keep in mind this post is over a year old now lol). Having said that, last I tried to lab this out, mpls nhrp does absolutely nothing. I get no label exchange over the tunnel interfaces after removing ldp. So, good the syntax is there, but it appears it's a work in progress.

  3. There is support, but it's kind of flaky in my opinion. So far, it only seems to work if your spokes are PEs. I'll write a post about it, but the skinny is:

    1. Replace 'mpls ip' with 'mpls nhrp' on the tunnel interfaces.
    2. Change vpnv4 peering from loopbacks to Tunnel interface IPs.

    What will happen is, you'll forward traffic ONLY with its vpn label (no transport label). So, if your PEs are DMVPN spokes then it works wonderfully. However, if your spokes are just LSRs it totally breaks MPLS lol.

  4. We use this heavily in our environment and mpls nhrp does indeed work as the solution for running mpls over dmvpn while still permitting spoke to spoke traffic.

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