MPLS – Dual Last Mile Connectivity on 2 CE’s

Pain Area and aspects for consideration:

• Last mile goes down frequently.
• Problem in Single Router.( Port Hang, IOS corrupt, Power, restarting etc)
• Mission critical application hampers.
• Should customer takes 2 different Service provider MPLS for all the locations?
• Will it be a cost effective solution?
• What Routing protocol needs to be run between CE-PE?
• What would the default-gateway IP address?
• How many ports/Routers required to connecting Dual last mile?
•  Customer should use HSRP/VRRP in LAN?

 – Solution Proposed

One of scenario where customer can have Dual last mile connectivity with 2 separate routers on MPLS VPN either HUB and Spoke or Mesh Topology. Most of failure happens at Last mile end of the Service Provider or CPE end which leads to high down time and less availability of the mission critical sites which affects business processes. 2 MPLS Service providers at every location offers you best Uptime but also increase Cost component, so it’s better to have Dual last mile connectivity from one service provider and terminate the circuit at 2 different CPE’s with Dual Power for better uptime and redundancy. Customers have to make sure that Service provider does not offer same last connectivity at any location unless if any link goes down or routers goes down that site would be isolated because both the last miles are same, so one link should be on Terrestrial last mile on primary router and other would be on RF or use other service provider last mile connectivity on secondary router to ensure better uptime. Both links should be terminated on separate router and Configure HSRP/VRRP at LAN and run Static routing with IP Tracking Command or use BGP as a Routing Protocol for WAN which ensure automatic failover on secondary link if primary link goes down.

Technical Arrangement:

1. Topology Support – Hub and Spoke or MESH.
2. Terminate both MPLS links on different CE Routers.
3. Configured HSRP/VRRP in both the CE routers for LAN redundancy.
4. CE Router should have 1 Layer3 port + 1 Layer2 port.
5. Users Gateway IP address will be Virtual IP address of HSRP/VRRP.
6. Active- Failover Scenario-If Primary Link/CPE goes down traffic will re-route on secondary MPLS link.
7. CE-PE Recommendation routing protocols would be eBGP with Private AS No.
8. Use BGP attributes Weight/Local Preference for manipulate outgoing traffic and As path prepend for influencing incoming traffic.