Hi Sami,

If you want to respond, please elaborate so anyone who is following this thread 
can benefit from the exchange; otherwise, it won’t be productive. Please see my 
responses marked w/ [AS].

From: "Boutros, Sami" <sbout...@ciena.com>
Date: Friday, November 20, 2020 at 10:51 AM
To: Cisco Employee <saja...@cisco.com>, Sami Boutros <boutros.s...@gmail.com>, 
"Ali Sajassi (sajassi)" <sajassi=40cisco....@dmarc.ietf.org>
Cc: "bess@ietf.org" <bess@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [**EXTERNAL**] Re: [bess] Issues w/ 
draft-boutros-bess-elan-services-over-sr

Hi Ali,

Please see inline.


Sighhh! The first section of your draft (section 1) and the first two 
paragraphs of that section talks about (1) and (2) that I mentioned in my 
email. Basically, Introduction section states these two reasons as the 
underlying reasons for your draft.

[Sami] In fact, it is not, this is simply an opening statement explaining the 
control plane complexity that we are trying to simplify and is by no mean 
objectives to either reduce # of PWs and # of MAC entries, our proposal is a 
control plane simplification that eliminates need for PWs or EVPN control plane 
distribute any # of mac entries. You know there is a difference between 
reducing control plane overhead and eliminating it!

[AS] This draft is a technical draft and not a marketing white paper, so when 
you talk about a 20 year-old VPLS technology and give example wrt its scale 
issue, then I’d like to know why you are not mentioning PBB-VPLS which 
eliminate the PW scale issue of VPLS. And if you think doing control-plane 
signaling in LDP or BGP for PBB-VPLS is complex, then why not mention you can 
use static PW setup (via a controller). Why these existing solutions are not 
enough to address your concern if you want to use the old-method of data-plane 
learning.

With respect to EVPN, every routes in EVPN has a purpose but if you want to use 
a subset of features and use data-plane learning, then EVPN allows for that. As 
you may know PBB-EVPN uses only a subset of EVPN routes & functions while doing 
data-plane learning. So, if you think EVPN control-plane is complex and do 
data-plane learning, then why not use PBB-EVPN? Can you detail for me what 
aspects of PBB-EVPN is too complex for you?

As I explained in details in my response, we have been there and done that long 
time ago; however, I don’t see any mention of the previous work and RFCs in 
your draft, so maybe you don’t know about them (History is the best teacher one 
can have).

[Sami] I love history and have a library of history books at home! Please list 
drafts and other previous work that talked about eliminating PW signaling and 
we will be more than happy to reference it!

[AS] I mentioned all those RFCs in my first email. And wrt VxLAN RFC, it is 
7348.

Also, you didn’t address any of them issues that I raise and instead. I will 
list them again here and please respond  clearly to each of them:


  1.  If you want to do data-plane learning over SR, why not use PBB-EVPN over 
SR. As I mentioned PBB-EVPN is agnostic of underlay tunnel and it can work with 
SR, MPLS, TE, etc.
[Sami] Our proposal is not about using complex control plane to setup PWs  or 
EVPN to start with, so why should we use it?

[AS] Again,  if you want to have technical discussions, please elaborate on 
exactly what aspects of PBB-EVPN  control plane is complex given PBB-EVPN uses 
ONLY a subset of EVPN routes and procedures/functions.

  1.  How does your solution take care of VxLAN encoding which is prevalent in 
DC and EN? For VxLAN w/ data-plane learning, can you tell me why RFC 7348 (done 
10 years ago) is not applicable? Needless to say that both data-plane and 
control-plane solutions for VxLAN was introduced at the same time about 10 
years ago and industry decided in favor of control-plane!!
[Sami] We are not saying by any mean don’t use EVPN. And we do respect the 
industry and service providers choice, so can we leave it to service providers 
and industry to decide their choice of technology or control plane!

[AS] But that wasn’t my question. What I am saying is we have seen this play 
ten years ago and how is your proposal handle VxLAN encap and how it is 
different from RFC7348.

  1.  How do you want to address IRB in your proposal? Will IRB be never be 
used in your proposal?
[Sami] We will address IRB in the next rev of the draft, as we see our proposal 
will provide great benefits to Data Center customers specially when using SRv6.

[AS] Nice marketing ☺ but can you give us a technical explanation now in one 
paragraph?

  1.  How do you want to address unequal LB for All-Active MH?
[Sami] In fact, how to achieve unequal LB with our solution was clearly 
explained on the slides I presented

[AS] Sami, referring me to a slide-page that doesn’t explain it and saying “it 
was clearly explained” is not productive. The one to last slide only says:
“Packets destined to the MH CE connected to node 5 and node 6 can be 
load-balanced (ECMP/UCMP) across the core given that the MAC addressed were 
learned via anycast SID hosted node 5 and 6.”
You only make the claim that it can be done and you don’t explain how it can be 
done. Have you read unequal-lb draft? How does the link bw info is conveyed to 
other PEs and how those PE perform unequal LB?


  1.  How do you want to address host mobility where a MAC is associated with 
multiple IP address?
[Sami] This as well we will address in the next Rev. Stay tuned.

[AS]  It is fine just saying you haven’t thought about it yet ☺ If you have 
just give a paragraph on how?

Now, with respect to your two claims:

  1.  Simplification: A solution can be simplified if it doesn’t need to 
address much of anything ☺ I.e., if it doesn’t need to address IRB, to address 
unequal LB, to address multiple IP address for a MAC, to address optimum mcast 
for L2&L3 simultaneously (IRB), etc.
[Sami] Please see above responses on IRB, and unequal LB. As for mcast, we 
don’t have plan yet for that.

[AS] I did and I will be waiting for your detailed response.

  1.  Anycast SID: the notion of anycast SID and anycast IP address for 
All-Active multi-homing is not new and again has been done for ages. Cisco 
proprietary solution for All-Active multi-homing (called VPC) before EVPN was 
based on anycast IP address. However, there are drawback for it – one of which 
is underlay topology decides LB instead of the actual link BW of MCLAG!!
[Sami] As I mentioned to Jorge, we are not inventing anycast SID we are simply 
using it, this is BTW an IETF draft not a patent application!

[AS] And as I was explaining in my response to Jorge, underlay mechaism has 
issues when used for overlay purposes !

Cheers,
Ali

Thanks,

Sami

Cheers,
Ali

From: Sami Boutros <boutros.s...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6:32 PM
To: "Ali Sajassi (sajassi)" <sajassi=40cisco....@dmarc.ietf.org>
Cc: "bess@ietf.org" <bess@ietf.org>, Cisco Employee <saja...@cisco.com>, Sami 
Boutros <sbout...@ciena.com>
Subject: Re: [bess] Issues w/ draft-boutros-bess-elan-services-over-sr

Hi Ali,

The draft doesn’t state neither 1 or 2 below. I’m not sure if we are looking at 
the same draft.

Here is the text in the draft introduction


   The goal of the proposed approach is to greatly simplify control

   plane functions and minimize the amount of control plane messages PE

   nodes have to process.  In this version of the document, we assume

   Segment Routing (SR) underlay network.  A future version of this

   document will generalize the underlay network to both classical MPLS

   and SR technologies.



   The proposed approach does not require PW, and hence the control

   plane complexity and message overhead associated with signaling and

   maintaining PWs are eliminated.

Our goal is to simplify:

1- The control plane by signaling very few messages possibly 1 message per node 
to signal all ELAN services configured on that node, presenting each ELAN 
service as 1 bit in the control plane message.

2- The data plane by setting up much less control plane elements like PWs, 
tunnels etc., and more importantly leveraging SR redundancy mechanisms of any 
cast SID to remove the need of any overlay convergence or redundancy mechanisms.

Not sure if any the stuff u listed below can address any of the above!

Thanks,

Sami




On Nov 19, 2020, at 12:21 PM, Ali Sajassi (sajassi) 
<sajassi=40cisco....@dmarc.ietf.org<mailto:sajassi=40cisco....@dmarc.ietf.org>> 
wrote:

Sami,

Since we didn’t have time to discuss the issues during the BESS meeting, let me 
explain and elaborate them here:

The draft states the following two main objectives for its purpose but both 
have been addressed already !!


  1.  Reducing # of PWs in VPLS:

     *   VPLS (both BGP and LDP) is a 20-year old technology which is getting 
deprecated and many providers (SP, DC, and EN) are moving toward EVPN. However, 
a few years after VPLS (about 15 years ago) we introduced PBB-VPLS (RFCs 7041 
and 7080) to address the PW scale issues along with few other things.

  1.  Reducing # of EVPN MAC route advertisements:

     *   This may have been an issue 10 years ago and that’s why we introduced 
simultaneously both EVPN and PBB-EVPN (RFC 7623) but not anymore. PBB-EVPN uses 
data-plane learning and it uses concepts of service-id, source B-MAC (for MAC 
learning) and destination B-MAC (for BUM ID), and same concepts are used in 
your draft. Furthermore RFC 7623 supports All-Active multi-homing as well as 
Single-Active with all the improvements that came later including per-ISID 
c-mac flushing that Jorge presented during the call. Needless to say that 
PBB-EVPN is transport agnostic and can work with SR, MPLS, TE, etc.

So,  my question is that: what is the point of this draft? Are you trying to 
have a bit more compressed header over what we currently have in PBB-EVPN 
because in terms of functionality, I don’t see much difference. However, I see 
even more issues than PBB-EVPN such as IRB handling  and Unequal load-balancing 
 for an ES.

The idea of breaking a PW in to three components of service-id, source-id, and 
dest-id has been around for almost twenty years. I introduced mvpls draft in 
2002, followed by PBB-VPLS. VxLAN RFC (which also talks about data-plane 
learning) is along the same idea introduced in 2010. And finally PBB-EVPN in 
2012. So, why do we need to re-invent the wheel again?

-Ali
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