iamjeffvader's studymotron and rantatorium

Well the day has finally come, segment routing is in the land of the hardware-have-nots with the release of demo image 5.2.0 for IOS XRv. I was about to hit the hay last night when I saw the location appearing on the Twitter courtesy of @ciscoiosxr and my tiredness quickly left me. I have been waiting for something on SR for what seems like an eternity, imagine my sadness when the files started downloading at 200K, Santa was going to make me wait. Finally the vmdk downloaded and I was ready to go.

In this post I will show you a brief outline of how to configure SR in ISIS and some basic reachability. It’s pretty straightforward to get a base network up and running but unfortunately there is not a lot of documentation on it. Have a look here for some info on CRS 5.2.x which mentions it. Also for reference have a read of the draft here.

So, what does the topology look like?

Each router is running ISIS (process is called SR), there is no explicit MPLS configuration required in the traditional sense (mpls ldp, rsvp etc). XR1 and XR5 are PEs and have a VPNv4 session between each other. The customer VRF has one loopback defined on each PE which is redistributed in to VRF to prove the concept.

The only place we need to make changes from typical routing configuration is under the ISIS process:

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3#sho run router isis SR
Wed Jul 9 13:12:59.112 UTC
router isis SR
is-type level-2-only
net 49.0001.0000.0000.0003.00
address-family ipv4 unicast
metric-style wide
segment-routing mpls
!
interface Loopback0
address-family ipv4 unicast
prefix-sid index 20003
!
===snipiddy snip, nothing special here===

The only changes we had to make were to add in segment-routing mpls under the IPv4 unicast AF and set a prefix segment ID on the loopback address. Now from my reading of the draft the loopback should be a Node SID but that command doesn't seem to be available in this release. The number you choose for your SID will be altered by the OS and fit in to the actual range in use which is platform dependent. Here we support over 1 million labels so the configured prefix SID is added to 900000 with a max value of 65535 (more on that later). I chose 2000x where x is XRx from the node name. As an aside you cannot configure the prefix-sid index on a physical interface:

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1(config)#router isis SR
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1(config-isis)#int g0/0/0/0
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1(config-isis-if)#add ipv4
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1(config-isis-if-af)#prefix index 30001
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1(config-isis-if-af)#commit
Wed Jul 9 14:31:37.859 UTC

% Failed to commit one or more configuration items during a pseudo-atomic 
operation. All changes made have been reverted. Please issue 'show 
configuration failed [inheritance]' from this session to view the errors

Now let's have a look at the network and see what we can see. Again documentation isn't readily available so bear with me here...

We can see XR1 is sending us one VPNv4 prefix, which is 10.0.0.1/32, the loopback10 address from VRF CUST over yonder the network:

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho bgp vpnv4 uni summ | i 1.1.1.1
Wed Jul 9 13:29:31.354 UTC
1.1.1.1 0 65000 62 62 7 0 0 00:58:53 1
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho bgp vpnv4 uni vrf CUST 10.0.0.1/32 | b 1.1.1.1
Wed Jul 9 13:31:09.727 UTC
1.1.1.1 (metric 40) from 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1)
Received Label 16000
Origin incomplete, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, internal, best, group-best, 
import-candidate, imported
Received Path ID 0, Local Path ID 1, version 6
Extended community: RT:1:1
Source VRF: CUST, Source Route Distinguisher: 1:1
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#

And just to be sure this is what XR1 is sending

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1#sho bgp vpnv4 uni labels | i 1/32
Wed Jul 9 13:36:07.657 UTC
10.0.0.1/32 0.0.0.0 nolabel 16000

We are receiving our label from XR1 of 16000, standard XR fare there. How about the MPLS forwarding table? Lets look from XR5 to XR1 via XR3 and XR2 (path via XR4 is costed out)

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho mpls for labels 920001
Wed Jul 9 13:38:23.908 UTC
Local Outgoing Prefix Outgoing Next Hop Bytes
Label Label or ID Interface Switched
------ ----------- ------------------ ------------ --------------- ------------
920001 920001 No ID Gi0/0/0/0 10.3.5.3 4585 

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3#sho mpls for labels 920001
Wed Jul 9 13:37:47.240 UTC
Local Outgoing Prefix Outgoing Next Hop Bytes
Label Label or ID Interface Switched
------ ----------- ------------------ ------------ --------------- ------------
920001 920001 No ID Gi0/0/0/0 10.2.3.2 5269

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR2#sho mpls for labels 920001
Wed Jul 9 13:38:47.046 UTC
Local Outgoing Prefix Outgoing Next Hop Bytes
Label Label or ID Interface Switched
------ ----------- ------------------ ------------ --------------- ------------
920001 Pop No ID Gi0/0/0/0 10.1.2.1 5868

And finally lets looks at the ISIS database on XR1

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1#sho isis database verbose XR1.00-00 | b Seg
Wed Jul 9 13:43:26.497 UTC
Segment Routing: I:1 V:0, SRGB Base: 900000 Range: 65535
Metric: 10 IS-Extended XR1.01
Metric: 10 IS-Extended XR1.03
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 1.1.1.1/32
Prefix-SID Index: 20001, R:0 N:0 P:0
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 10.1.2.0/24
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 10.1.4.0/24

Here we can see the Prefix SID is set to 20001 and also the range supported to 65535. We're all about the link state protocol so XR5 sees:

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho isis da ver XR1.00-00 | b Seg
Wed Jul 9 13:44:42.612 UTC
Segment Routing: I:1 V:0, SRGB Base: 900000 Range: 65535
Metric: 10 IS-Extended XR1.01
Metric: 10 IS-Extended XR1.03
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 1.1.1.1/32
Prefix-SID Index: 20001, R:0 N:0 P:0
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 10.1.2.0/24
Metric: 10 IP-Extended 10.1.4.0/24

Now if we look at the CEF tables for the default VRF and the CUST VRF lets see what we have:

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho cef 1.1.1.1/32 | i label
Wed Jul 9 13:48:58.124 UTC
local label 920001 labels imposed {920001}

The BGP next hop will be using 920001 for the transport label and we know the VPN label issued by BGP over on XR1 will be 16000 so the label stack for VRF CUST on XR5 towards 10.0.0.1/32 on XR1 is...

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#sho ip cef vrf CUST 10.0.0.1/32 | i label
Wed Jul 9 13:51:29.064 UTC
next hop 10.3.5.3/32 Gi0/0/0/0 labels imposed {920001 16000}

Magic. Now does this work in the dataplane? We should see traffic MPLS'd via XR3 and XR2 and finally IPv4'd in the VRF at XR1

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR5#trace vrf CUST 10.0.0.1 so 10.0.0.5
Wed Jul 9 13:52:21.800 UTC

Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 10.0.0.1

1 10.3.5.3 [MPLS: Labels 920001/16000 Exp 0] 39 msec 49 msec 29 msec
2 10.2.3.2 [MPLS: Labels 920001/16000 Exp 0] 29 msec 29 msec 39 msec
3 10.1.2.1 39 msec * 39 msec

Beautiful! As we can see the label stack stays consistent across the network as every node knows that 920001 is the label to reach 1.1.1.1/32, our BGP next hop from XR5.
In the opposite direction we should have a transport label of 920005 and the VPN label, which should be 16000 as well, coincidentally as there is only a single service and no other signalling protocols in play.

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR1#trace vrf CUST 10.0.0.5 so 10.0.0.1
Wed Jul 9 13:53:59.443 UTC

Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 10.0.0.5

1 10.1.2.2 [MPLS: Labels 920005/16000 Exp 0] 119 msec 39 msec 39 msec
2 10.2.3.3 [MPLS: Labels 920005/16000 Exp 0] 39 msec 29 msec 29 msec
3 10.3.5.5 39 msec * 29 msec

One of the benefits of SR is being able to statically route your traffic without maintaining state associated with RSVP. I don't know if that feature is available in this release, I haven't found anything yet.

Pig iron time, can we configure a prefix SID higher than 65535? No would be the answer

RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config)#router isis SR
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis)#int lo0
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if)#add ipv4 uni
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if-af)#prefix index 65536
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if-af)#commit
Wed Jul 9 13:26:46.825 UTC

% Failed to commit one or more configuration items during a pseudo-atomic operation. All changes made have been reverted. Please issue 'show configuration failed [inheritance]' from this session to view the errors
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if-af)#prefix index 65535
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if-af)#commit
Wed Jul 9 13:26:51.565 UTC
RP/0/0/CPU0:XR3(config-isis-if-af)#do sho mpls for | i 655
Wed Jul 9 13:27:03.434 UTC
965535 Aggregate default: Per-VRF Aggr[V] \

I hope to write more on SR as more and more features become available, and interop stuff between vendors but for now enjoy the wonder that is the IGP delivered label.