Having never configured and netlab-ed Huawei's VRP, i have been courios if this operating system supports SR-MPLS and how it is documented. This netlab uses a 6 years old VRP NE40 appliance to find this out. At the point of writing and constructing this netlab I had no information about the state of implementation of SR MPLS on VRP operating system. This is the 2nd version of the netlab. The 1-st netlab which is not documented here in my blog used the CE12800 GNS3 appliance to find it out, and failed horribly. Use a NE40 Huawei router appliance for this GNS3 setup, or any router appliance you have available. The CE Huawei appliance does not work, actually it can be setup and configured to have SR-MPLS, but the IP forwarding or label switching using SR-MPLS using the CE12800 switches fails.

Huawei nomenclature uses:

• NE - NetEngine - router platform
• CE - CloudEngine - switch platform

The CE term used here in this blog entry, when used means Customer Edge router, not CloudEngine.

This is plane SR-MPLS configuration using the Huawei's NE40 router. Trying to find out how far the Segment Routing is supported among all big router vendors. And if I am lucky maybe the SRv6 for IPv4 and IPv6 if I get it working, but this will be explained in a separate blog entry. This netlab will be know for experienced network engineers using the old-school (now deprecated) LDP protocol, here LDP is replaced with SR-MPLS.

NE40 image supports SR-MPLS out of the box. This is the version used over here in GNS3:

If you happen to build this network topology use routers, not switches.

Network topology

The topology is a star topology, all links are point to point using /31 IPv4 addressing:

      PE2
       |
       |
PE1 -- P1 -- PE3
       |
       |
      RRv4

IPv4 loopback0 address overview plus the according SR index, or MPLS label index and IS-IS NSAP addressing overview:

All PE routers have internal BGP neighorship to the BGP route reflector.

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This is the second Huawei VRP segment routing blog post, I never configured SRv6 using this particular router platform, here VRP. Everything is configured from scratch using availbe documentation ressources from 2 different competing routing vendors. The networking topology is taken out of the BRKSPG-2203 Cisco's SRv6 uSID Cisco Live presentation, using the Huawei's NE5000E virtual GNS3 appliance.

Huawei calls its SRv6 implementation SRv6 BE, the BE stands for best effort, but it is SRv6. Best effort is a configuration command found and used in the VRP operating system:

segment-routing ipv6 best-effort

The command is part of the the VRP bgp configuration section.

The network topology and its IP addressing is taken out of the the Cisco's BRKSPG 2203 presentation linked at the bottom in the references part end of the blog entry. Did not find any VRP documentation about the usage and configuration of uSID F3216 in the official Huawei documentation. Configuring a IPv6 link-local SRv6 locator works and the network topology forwards IP packets form end to end just fine. There is no debugging and protocol analysing included, it was hard enough to gather all the information available and build this network topology. If you find errors write me an email, and I will try to correct these spotted errors.

The configurations shown work. Configurations can be copy pasted and will result immediately in a IPv4 forwarding SRv6 topology.

VRP version used in this SRv6 netlab running on all provider routers.

Network topology

      PE2
       |
       |
PE1 -- P1 -- PE3
       |
       |
      RRv6

The network topology is the same as in the previous blog entry except there is no migration implemented from LDP to SRv6. I did not bother cluttering the example and configured the final SRv6 state. The RRv4 BGP route reflector has been lef out of the example to make it more easy to follow. There is no migration path from LDP to SRv6 shown. Additionally the IPv6 addressing is_slightly adjusted for few routers to make it more easy to recognize and follow, once it is running.

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