Final project about MPLS

[Divad89]

I'm about to write my final project, and I've decided it should be about implementing MPLS in a corporate network.
But here's the catch, is it possible to configure a MPLS network, not in the providers backbone, but in the intra-network for the company? And then setup a VPN-connection between the two sites of the company?
And I would be using GNS3 for simulating the network.

Thanks in advance

---
David

 

[sactwnguy]

I have not tried it in GNS3 but you should be able to configure MPLS just fine. All you need to do is configure vrf's, BGP and LDP to the PE router in your design.

 

[Cooky]

We have our own internal MPLS network within our datacenters.
While I never personally ran MPLS in GNS, I know a former colleague had it on his laptop.

 

[grendel19]

I'm curious the reasoning behind running MPLS internally? As far as I understand, MPLS allows for virtual routing tables so that different customers can have overlapping subnets since they'd be using their own VRF.

Internally, you have basically unlimited choices of RFC1918 private IP's to route, so why add complication with MPLS configuration?

Again, not saying this is right or wrong, I just very curious as to the reasoning behind this.

 

[drebo]

MPLS can be used for more advanced traffic engineering and also extending L2 adjacencies via pseudowires/VPLS across LSPs in the event you don't have Nexus. Of course, you can do the latter with L2TP as well.

Most places don't need internal MPLS, but it can add some benefits to an extremely large, complex network.

 

[sactwnguy]

I used to use vrf's to separate management traffic routing from production. A lot of newer Cisco devices have this built in to the on board management interface. I have also used them to vpn to the early version of Microsoft azure. Every azure site would use the exact same ip addresses for the tunnel interfaces and it could not be changed so I created vrf's for each tunnel then leaked the server subnets into one shared vrf.

 

[Cooky]

It's a great way to isolate & keep different types of traffic separate.
For example, you can route internal, DMZ, PCI, Production, Dev traffic through the same router w/o having to manage ridiculous ACL's.

It's also a nice way to leak different default routes into different VRF's, if you have multiple exit Internet segments for different purposes.

 

[grendel19]

Thanks for the info all, the uses mentioned make sense. I'm not as well versed on the provider side of networking. Now I have more to read up on.