Hi,

Given that the flood reflector authors have asked the chairs to do a call for 
adoption, might someone from that group be able to talk to a couple of the 
points/questions from my mail? I think it would help me (and maybe others) in 
making informed responses to any adoption call.

- Is this proposing to add "virtual links" to IS-IS (in addition to the flood 
reflector part)?

- Is there a general-purpose non-complex non-tunneling solution possible?

Thanks,
Chris.
[as WG member]


> On Jun 6, 2020, at 7:18 AM, Christian Hopps <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> [ all the following is as a WG member ]
> 
> I've been thinking a lot about the proposed flooding reduction drafts 
> currently vying for adoption by the WG. I've been doing this thinking in the 
> context of wearing an operator hat (i.e., trying to leverage my prior 
> experience working for DT on Terastream). In the abstract the Terastream 
> architecture presented a good way to visualize and compare the benefits of 
> using one of these solutions w/o getting too complex. A simplified model of 
> this design can be seen as a horseshoe of horseshoes. the Major horseshoe is 
> L2 and the minor horseshoes are L1. Each L1 area has 2 L2 routers for 
> redundancy (I'll consider more though), and all L2 routers are full-mesh 
> connected to support that redundancy.
> 
> Telco
> 
> <PastedGraphic-4.png>
> 
> But let's map this to a more DC centric view (I guess?) where each L1 area 
> now has 10 L2 routers instead of 2 (i.e., 10%, but that could be change that 
> later if need be).
> 
> Natural Design
> 
> 
> <PastedGraphic-5.png>
> 
> Now for whatever reason some operators do not want to provision 
> high-bandwidth transit links between their L2 routers in their L1 areas. This 
> is critically important b/c otherwise you would simply use the above Natural 
> Design. I'd like to better understand why that isn't just the answer here.
> 
> Anyway, forging ahead, here's what we get with unchanged IS-IS to support 
> "use everything for transit"
> 
> All In
> 
> <PastedGraphic-6.png>
> 
> So the 800 L2 LSPs, and the impact on flooding dynamics, are what these 
> drafts are trying to reduce or avoid.
> 
> Area Proxy
> 
> First I'll look at area proxy. This seems a fairly simple idea, basically 
> it's taking the now L1L2 areas and advertising them externally as a single 
> LSP so the impact is very similar to if they were L1 only. This maps fairly 
> closely to the Telco and Natural Design from above. Each L1 router in the 
> Telco design would have 100 LSPs The L12 routers would have 100 L1 + 16 L2 
> LSP. In the Natural Design each L1 router has 100 L1 and each L12 router 
> would have 100 L1 and 80 L2. With Area Proxy each router  has 100 L1 and 100 
> "Inner L2 LSPs" and 80 "Outer LSPs" + 8 "Outer L2 LSPs"
> 
> The key thing to note here is that if you double the number of areas you only 
> add to the Outside LSP and Proxy count just as it would scale in the Natural 
> Design, so going from 8 to 16 areas here adds 80 more "Outside LSPs" and 8 
> more L2 Proxy LSPs for a total of 276 L2 LSPs even though you've added 800 
> more routers to your network.
> 
> 
> <PastedGraphic-10.png>
> 
> Flood Reflectors
> 
> I'm less sure I understand this draft so please forgive me if I get this 
> wrong. After reading this draft a few times I believe it is basically 
> providing "L2 virtual links" over an L1 area between the area's L2 edge 
> routers and then using a "flood reflector" to reduce the number of required 
> "virtual links" by creating a hub-and-spoke topology of them.
> 
> The draft does a bit of hand-waving at "judicious scoping of reachability" 
> being used in place of tunneling. I could guess at what this might mean, but 
> I shouldn't have to; the draft should spell it out so it can be judged as a 
> viable option or not. So, the only choice I see presented is to use a 
> full-mesh of L1 tunnels between the L12 edge routers.
> 
> Anyway, here's a picture
> 
> <PastedGraphic-9.png>
> 
> If, in fact, the draft is talking about adding virtual links to IS-IS I think 
> it should say that. There's a lot of experience in OSPF with virtual links 
> and some of the trouble they have caused. There's also important details in 
> making them work right in OSPF that doesn't seem to be in the current draft, 
> so it's not clear what actual level of complexity is going to be required to 
> make this all work, and importantly, if that would then be palatable.
> 
> I also do not like the idea of all of these automatic "fowarding-tunnels". 
> They would be disjoint from the advertised "flood reflector" tunnel topology 
> (right?) -- it seems like a management/debugability nightmare to me, and I'm 
> curious which operators are keen to have a bunch of unadvertised tunnels 
> added to their IGP network. :) If the draft really can work in general w/o 
> the tunnels I would appreciate seeing those mechanics described rather than 
> just hinted at.
> 
> The ideas are interesting for sure, but the draft doesn't seem fully fleshed 
> out, and I'm worried it'll be overly complex when it is.
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris.
> [as WG member]
> 
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