Subject: [bmwg] Comments on draft-ietf-bmwg-basic-convergence

From: "UTTARO, JAMES" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:12:19 +0000

Meta Comments.

A picture showing the T0 failure T1 failure detection T3 Control Plane Detects T3 Control Plane Converged T4 Forwarding Plan Converged would be a useful addition to the reporting format.

You should indicate your sampling interval.

As part of the route distribution it should be made clear the various leaf to node ratios you recommend.

This goes way back for me but in the late 90s we used routers that prioritized other protocols/processes over BGP, so part of our convergence testing would be to stress out multiple protocols and get data on how BGP convergence may be affected. It is important when doing this benchmarking to simulate the real world design and behavior..

Section 1

Will VPNV4 be included in subsequent drafts?  Many of our designs are built around providing a quickly converging BGP Control Plane for our VPN customers.

Section 1.4

"To ensure uniformity of the results all optional
   parameters SHOULD be disabled and all settings SHOULD be changed to
   default, these may include BGP timers as well."

We modify the default parameters to enhance convergence.. It may be useful to solicit from SPs and others what the settings are and use that as a baseline.

Section 5.1

"Running tests with a varying number of routes and route mixtures is

   important to get a full characterization of a single peer."

I did not see it but having multiple peers with varying route mixtures is an important point. For this type of testing the results change dramatically based on workload profile.

Section 5.2.1

An interesting addl case of interest would be when both links hot in a load balanced manner. We use this configuration quite a bit and a result of interest would be how long to reprogram the FIB and point the ½ number of entries using RR1 to be re-programmed to use RR2. This is a function of the vendor/platform software design and how it deals with FIB entries ( We hope for indirection )

Section 5.8

Does this address both GR and LLGR?