+1 Mark There’s no modern silicon that doesn’t support MPLS (and is capable of imposing at least 3 labels). There’s 0 additional price for vendors to enable MPLS on their devices. The rest is subject to vendors’ licensing and is completely artificial. SR-MPLS uses MPLS data-plane and requires no changes to silicon, since head-end might be required to push more labels (TE, BSIDs, services)one needs to pay attention - (RFC8491/8476) allow signaling of MSD (maximum SID depth) if centralized controller/PCE is used for path computation. LDP after all the years of bug fixing is still a crappy protocol, moving to SR-MPLS makes all the sense. Cheers, Jeff
On Jan 15, 2022, at 11:50, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:
On 1/15/22 19:22, Colton Conor wrote:
True, but in general MPLS is more costly. It's available on limited devices, from limited vendors. Infact, many of these vendors, like Extreme, charge you if you want to enable MPLS features on a box.
Well, I don't entirely agree.
Pretty much all chips shipping now, either custom or merchant silicon, will support MPLS. Whether the vendor chooses to implement it in code or not is a whole other matter.
If you need MPLS, chances are you can afford it. If you don't, then you don't have to worry about it.
For Extreme, are you referring to before or after they picked up Brocade?
There is MPLS available in a number of cheap software suites. Even Mikrotik provides MPLS support. Whether it works or not, I can't tell you.
VyOS supports is too. Whether it works or not, I can't tell you.
But I think we are long past the days of "MPLS is expensive".
Mark.