[ixpmanager] Tehran IX

[Barry O'Donovan]

Hi Shahab,

Shahab Vahabzadeh wrote on 02/11/2019 11:08:
> I have my second question, I need to put one port in different vlans? 
> what can I do?
> 
> Let me give you an example and please help me in this:
> 
> Suppose we have Customer A, B and C.
> 
> Customer A: 5*10Gbps in Port Channel
> Customer B: 1*100Gbps
> Customer C: 1*10Gbps
> 
> All Customers are in VLAN 10 (Router Server VLAN and they have both IPv4 
> and IPv6 for peering with RS).
> But in out topology per peer we define a vlan for customers, Customer A 
> with B VLAN 100, Customer A with C VLAN 200, Customer B with C VLAN 300.

So this is a very (very) usual topology for an IXP. I'm not even sure if 
it fits the definition. An IXP is a single (V)LAN with more than two 
participants where any participant can peer with any other participant 
(and/or the route servers if they so wish).

Looks like you're trying to create private VLANs to facilitate PNIs over 
the IX infrastructure (private network interconnections).

I'm not immediately aware of any IX that operates in the manner you're 
suggesting. I have some recollection of some that tried in the past and 
quickly abandoned it or didn't succeed.

The number of VLANs needed if every participant was to peer with every 
other participant is: (n(n-1))/2 (the sum of natural numbers to n-1 
where n is the number of participants). I.e.

- 10 participants: 45 vlans
- 100 participants: 4,950 vlans

Note that you cannot actually support 100 members in this topology if 
they are all peering with each other.

I see this as a provisioning, support and diagnostic nightmare with even 
small numbers and with automation. At some point you'll scale past pure 
layer2 into something like vxlan / vpls and it'll get even harder.


I'm also curious as to what will stop members just peering with each 
other on the route server LAN? Their traffic will be participant route 
to participant router so do you plan to actually prevent bilateral BGP 
sessions on that lan with acls?



> So I need to have customers in proper VLAN maybe more than one.
> In Interface definition I saw you can choose one VLAN only.

While not the intended purpose of IXP Manager, it is possible by just 
adding a second VLAN interface. See the [+] button by VLAN interfaces in 
this screenshot:

https://docs.ixpmanager.org/usage/interfaces/#viewing-editing-an-interface


  - Barry