I have several sites interconnected using a MPLS WAN. The vendor does not provide any type of routing protocol over the MPLS and I would like to run one over it so I can failover to other links I have available. Since the MPLS doesn't support multicast my first thought was to create GRE tunnels thru the MPLS so I can run RIP and get the job done quick and dirty. Then I thought that I would like to try to accompish this in a more "elegant" fashion with a unicast routing protocol. I am hoping someone can suggest something that will work in this situation. Hopefully the suggestions won't include OSPF which seems rather complicated to implement.
Pls clarify , what is that you have an mpls WAN . Is that you have enabled MPLS over the WAN links you have and running static routes over it and you want to migrate it to some routing protocol.
The MPLS vendor provides the circuits and rotuers. Basically, I am using static routes now to point traffic to the MPLS routers. If the MPLS router or circuit goes down I have no way of knowing and must modify the static routes to use alternate circuits.
Just wanted to clear you one thing on the first part that mpls doesnt support multicast,But here you are going to run RIP over your GRE tunnel , so the final outcome is a multicast over your GRE , which is on ip .So it should also work over your provider MPLS Core.You can also run unicast updates in RIP by configuring the " individual neighbor command under rip "
I am trying to avoide building GRE tunnels to avoide complexity. I am not familiar with using unicast with RIP. Does it work like multi-hop with BGP? Because it seems that multi-hop BGP is what I need to do or at least something similar.
As you asked for something on GRE , I said that you can also run rip over the GRE , but you cannot do just like BGP .
You can do bgp , but it needs the help from your provider , because BGP is a routing protocol and can help you in learning the routes but doesnot do any traffic encapsulation .If all the ips are public ip's and routed by the provider then you can go ahead and do BGP if all the links you have are Serial links and provider doesnot do any routing changes .
if it is "only" about failure detection you could also use Optimized edge routing. Basically you instruct the router to check connectivity - f.e pings or TCP connnects _ to a configurable IP. This could f.e. be a server in your data center or a router at the main site. If connectivity fails you can specify a backup which should be used.
For a more detailed description and configuration examples f.e. have a look at "Primary and Backup WAN Links Using Cisco Optimized Edge Routing"
