Re: [bess] WG adoption poll - draft-fang-l3vpn-virtual-pe-05

For me the key question we should answer is if it does help developers implement vPE even if there is no new protocol extensions required.

From: Benson Schliesser <bensons@queuefull.net<mailto:bensons@queuefull.net>>
Date: Thursday 23 October 2014 17:02
To: Thomas Morin <thomas.morin@orange.com<mailto:thomas.morin@orange.com>>
Cc: L3VPN <l3vpn@ietf.org<mailto:l3vpn@ietf.org>>, "bess@ietf.org<mailto:bess@ietf.org>" <bess@ietf.org<mailto:bess@ietf.org>>
Subject: Re: [bess] WG adoption poll - draft-fang-l3vpn-virtual-pe-05

Hi, Thomas and BESS -

I generally agree with the sentiment expressed below. That's not to say that I object to adoption, because ongoing work on the text might result in something useful. And it certainly could be helpful to have an architecture document like this to help drive more detailed technical work.

Of course, just because we adopt a draft does not mean that we must publish it. I would support adoption of this draft with an understanding of its role in further development activities, and an acknowledgement that it could be expired and dropped if it doesn't result in useful work.

Cheers,
-Benson

On Oct 22, 2014 10:12 AM, "Thomas Morin" <thomas.morin@orange.com<mailto:thomas.morin@orange.com>> wrote:
Hi working group,

Let me chime a different bell...

(Please note well that this feedback is sent without my co-chair hat. I won't participate as a chair in the adoption decision on this draft.)

Let me quote the document: "A virtual PE (vPE) is a BGP/MPLS L3/L2 VPN PE software instance which may reside in any network or computing devices.". You can pretty much ignore the 'software' part of the definition since the document does obviously not ban the implementation of the forwarding plane in hardware.  What do we end up with ?  Answer: a virtual PE is... a PE !

So the notion presented by this document under the "virtual PE" name is merely an implementation choice that can be applied to RFC4364 and E-VPN. That explains why the amount of useful technical content in the document is so reduced (i.e. information that it neither obvious or already present elsewhere). I doubt that the document will be of any help to implementors or deployers.

Similarly, I doubt that it is very helpful to implementors or deployers to list all the split/no-split combinations for the control planes and dataplanes components; and furthermore nothing in that is really specific to BESS (e.g. it could apply equally to e.g. non-VPN BGP, or to some other routing protocol).

Don't misunderstand me, I think that the idea of implementing VRFs on the servers hosting VMs, is great. However, I don't think that a technical document is missing to facilitate the implementation of such an approach. It can be argued that an Informational RFC can be produced to promote the idea, but I would also challenge this: the IETF is not a marketing venue. [I would add that, even if it was, a 20+ pages RFC may not be the most efficient way to market an idea. People have been able to build solutions relying on this approach without a new RFC, and able to claim that their solution is based on IETF standard RFCs.]

Promoting the idea of an "SDN" implementation of PE functions (whatever that means) and/or organic data-plane/control-plane separation is yet another question, but if we were to adopt a document to promote this, at least I would expect the document to spell out the motivations and avoid just throwing I2RS references around.

At this point I'm leaving aside comments that could be made on details on the content, but I think that if this document was to be moved forward, a fair amount of clarification and editorial work would be needed. Given what I explained above, I don't think it would be worth to spend energy on that.

Overall, I don't think that BESS should adopt this document.

-Thomas

Sun Oct 19 2014 21:00:51 GMT+0200 (CEST), Martin Vigoureux:
Hello Working Group,

This email starts a two-week poll on adopting
draft-fang-l3vpn-virtual-pe-05 [1].

Please send comments to the list and state if you support adoption or
not (in both cases please also state the reasons).

This poll runs until November the 3rd.

Coincidentally, we remind you to check and then state on this list if you are aware, or not, of any undisclosed IPR (according to IETF IPR rules, see RFCs 3979, 4879, 3669 and 5378 for more details) relating to draft-fang-l3vpn-virtual-pe-05

If you are listed as a document author or contributor please respond to
this email and state whether or not you are aware of any relevant
IPR. The response needs to be sent to the L3VPN WG mailing list. The document will not advance to the next stage until a response has been
received from each author and contributor.

If you are on the L3VPN WG email list but are not listed as an author or
contributor, then please explicitly respond only if you are aware of any
IPR that has not yet been disclosed in conformance with IETF rules.

Thank you

M&T

---
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fang-l3vpn-virtual-pe-05

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