2 Service Provider MPLS Network on single CPE: Active Failover

Pain Area and aspects for consideration:

• If Last mile goes down frequently?
• MPLS Backbone issues with one Service Provider?  
• Should customer takes 2 different Service provider MPLS for all the locations?
• Will it be a cost effective solution?
• Up to what level of redundancy?
• Where is the Single point of Failure?
• Which Routing protocol needs to be run between CE-PE?
• What would the default-gateway IP address?
• How many ports required to connecting 2 Service Provider in Single CPE?

Solution Proposed :

This is one of the scenario where customer can ensure better uptime and high availability MPLS Network from 2 different Service providers, in this case study take 2 separate MPLS Network from 2 different Service Provider at each location either on HUB and Spoke or Mesh Topology and terminate into single CPE (Dual Power). Most of failure happens at Last mile end of the Service Provider which leads to high down time and less availability of the mission critical sites which affects business processes. Customers have to make sure that both Service providers offer their own last connectivity at every location unless if any last mile connectivity goes down that site would be down and isolate from the network because both the Service providers are different but on:the last miles they are using are same. This scenario also called multi-homing service providers. By configuration on CE and PE end at both the service providers, customers can have active-failover scenario where if any location primary link goes down traffic would be automatically rerouted on second service provider network without any manual intervention and users would experience seamless network connectivity at their end, but only single point of failure is CPE in this scenario and rest all are redundant network.

So in respect of solution recommendation is to run eBGP as a Routing protocol between CE-PE at WAN Side and corresponding Router should have minimum 2 routed ports and 1 LAN port , use Routers LAN interface as default gateway IP of every network equipment.

Technical Arrangment :

1. Topology would be either HUB and Spoke or MESH.
2. Terminate both the ISP MPLS Links into Single CE Router.
3. CE-PE Recommendation routing protocols would be eBGP with Private AS No.
4. Default Gateway IP Address will be MPLS CE Router of all the LAN side equipment.
5. CE Router should have 2 Layer3 port + 1 Layer2 port.
6. Use BGP attributes Weight/Local Preference for manipulate outgoing traffic and As path prepend for influencing incoming traffic.