On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> advice when they first started to attempt to migrate), or supporting
> super/sub-VLANs in an operational environment. Customers hated both,
> but at least they saw better performance once the hosting network was
> broken up per-customer VLANs.
Why would customers hate it? We have deployed super/subvlan for
residential DSL (1 static IP address per residential user) and we have
no
complaints afaik.
Yes, if you want more flexiblity to put any IP in any vlan in any or
alike, the implementation is lacking.
Customers hated it because of some very serious operational flaws. Some
stuff was to be expected, like seeing broadcast traffic in all subs
under a super-VLAN. Some stuff was truly flawed, like having some small
percentage of packets leaking across sub-VLANs. Residential customers
don't mind, and probably would never notice. Large corporate clients
who are putting important servers in a hosting environment get rather
concerned when you start seeing traffic (including cleartext login info)
from their neighbors on their interfaces.
Trying to convince your vendor that this (and other) flaw exists when
you're the only client using it in production, and you're pushing
several orders of magnitude more traffic than their labs, can be
slightly frustrating.
I personally felt that this was a solution in search of a problem. The
enterprise hosting division on an RBOC was probably not the best place
to deploy it.
The current low-end hosting environment is a problem that fits pretty
well, but based on my experience in that segment, there is a much bigger
return on investment in paying a couple of engineers well enough to
manage your VLAN allocations correctly and use existing (generally
secondary market) hardware and tools.
Jeremiah