Question on IP multicast, MPLS

[news2010a]

Hi,

Imagine I need to provide multicast to my customers over MPLS network:

Source-Sender-----CE1----(PE1    MPLS     PE2)----CE2----Receiver1

What I was told is that the customer should select which router is going to be the RP. Also, customer will need to make sure CE2 and CE1 interfaces are PIM enabled.

Questions:

1) In this simple scenario, do you agree that RP should be "CE1"?

2) I was told that setting up CE1 is a static RP is a good idea. Let me know your thoughts. I thought about redundancy... but I guess redundancy could make sense only if there is another circuit available for the customer on the Source-Sender site.

[Edison Ortiz · Accepted solution]

1) Yes, RP should be close to the source.

2) You can implement redundancy with Anycast RP + MSDP, if you plan to implement multiple RPs.

That design could be deployed with static RPs or dynamic RP advertising methods such as Auto-RP or BSR.

Regards,

Edison

[Robert Taylor]

What are you using to get the multicast over your mpls network?  Is the customer in its own VRF?  If so, you would most likely need to either:

A) Tunnel the traffic, for instance with GRE tunnels between the sites (this would be ok in a single site to single site scenario, not very scalable when you have multiple sites).

B) Enable MVPN on the mpls PE routers, where we encapsulate the traffic for that customers multicast groups over tunnels in the mpls cloud. (for this, you would essentially assign each of your customers (vrfs) a globally unique multicast group address that the PE routers use to pass PIM/mcast traffic over).

If you are not using VRFs, and this is just a simple mpls cloud with no customer segmentation (vrfs) then you would not have to use the above methods, and you could just enable full pim across the network.

To answer your specfic questions though, just using a static RP (at the source side) would be a very common and stable implementation.