Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

["Christopher L. Morrow" <christopher.morrow () mci com>]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
>
> > you are getting these anyway, thank network convergence for that... or
> > curse it, your call. things like 2547 'vpn' and the like are driving
> > prefix numbers up regardless of what the Internet is doing. Hardware
> > will be required to handle million(s) of prefixes sooner than large
> > scale v6 deployment IMHO.
>
> Both MPLS and any tunneled VPN over IP means the core won't have to know
> about all those prefixes (think aggregation of addresses regionally in the
> IP case and outer label in the MPLS case).

'core' doesn't matter so much, somewhere there has to be this knowledge...
Perhaps you'll get lucky with some 'edge' devices not having to know about
every destination, but I think that might be more rare than you'd like.

> So if you're building a 100G capable platform that'll do IPv6 and MPLS,
> how much difference would it be if you only had to support 16000 labels
> and 16000 IPv6 prefixes, rather than 2 million?

not sure, I'm a chemical engineer :) Seriously though, is the break 1-2M
or is it 10-20m? (doubling or orders of magnitude?)

> Then of course I guess the argument can be made to put everything on MPLS
> to avoid the core knowing about anything but outer labels.

oh yes, mpls everywhere! wait... did I say that? yuck.