Subject: [MBONED] charter revision and related issues

From: Eric Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:57:47 -0500

First, as one of the principal authors of the past and current MVPN solution
documents, I would like to say  that I would welcome more attention from the
MBONED WG.   The multicast  experience in MBONED  would be an  excellent and
much needed complement to the L3VPN expertise that exists in the L3VPN WG.  

MBONED is  about operational issues,  rather than protocol design,  and thus
can  complement  the  L3VPN  WG   just  as  well  as  it  has  traditionally
complemented the PIM WG (and a bunch of other multicast-oriented WGs).

Some posters may have given the impression that the L3VPN WG has a consensus
to  supplant  PIM with  BGP  as  the control  protocol.   That  is simply  a
misstatement of fact.  The evolving L3VPN standards support multiple control
planes and multiple  data planes.  To call any  particular MVPN profile "the
next generation" is mere marketing.  

As of right now, we have  operational experience with only one MVPN profile,
the one  that uses  PIM as  the control plane  and GRE  tunnels as  the data
plane.   There  are  many   deployments,  and  they  are  even  multi-vendor
interoperable.

It is  true that these deployments  differ slightly from  the standard.  The
document  draft-rosen-l3vpn-mvpn-profiles-00.txt  describes  in  detail  the
differences between the pre-standards  deployments and the new standard.  As
you will  see if  you look  at this document,  these differences  are simply
matters  of  protocol encoding,  and  have  no  effect on  operations.   Any
operational  lessons learned from  these deployments  apply directly  to the
fully standard PIM+GRE  profiles.  It is simply absurd  to claim that MBONED
should not  consider anything  learned from deployments  that have  even the
most minor differences from the standards.

Since  PIM+GRE is a  valid profile  of the  L3VPN WG  standards, it  is also
absurd  to claim  that anyone  is  trying to  do a  run-around the  official
standards process.

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