All things related to multicast

[Peter John Hill <>]

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 09:09  AM, Lappa, Joseph wrote:
> Hi,
>    We are thinking of two possible scenarios:
>
>         1) Make each of our core Cisco 6500s MSDP peers with each other
>          (full mesh), with our Junipers, and configure Anycast-RP with
> PIM-SM.

This is what we are doing up the street at CMU. We have to "core" 6509s 
and 20 distribution 6509s. We use option
#10 from: http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/iosw/tech/rppim_rg.htm
which is said to give:
Strength and Weaknesses of Anycast—Auto-RP—sparse-mode
 Convergence:            Excellent
 Redundancy:             Excellent
 Ease of use:            Excellent
 Scoping:                        Excellent
 Safety:                         Excellent
 Load balancing:         Excellent

Our border router is doing mbgp with our provider, and we have an msdp 
mesh with the two core routers and the border. Then PIM sparse-mode to 
the distribution.

It works very well. It took some time to get it all working, but it is 
pretty solid now.


> Questions are:
>
>   What is the prefered method these days determining RP?  Anycast-RP or
> BSR?

My vote for Anycast

>   Are there any problems in running Anycast-RP with HSRP?

Not sure, but curious, since we are looking into using it.

>   How hard is it to debug problems with Anycast-RP vs. PIM BSR?

We have a document that someone in our group got at the last Nanog 
conference that is step by step debugging multicast. We could send you 
a copy. We find that it works so well, and we need to troubleshoot it 
so little, that when we do, we need to ramp up our understanding 
(knowledge has a halflife). It is handy to have a step by step guide.

>   Will MSDP updates cause a big hit on our 6500 MSFCs?

We are running sup1a/msfc 1s and have not noticed any major problems.

> Thanks,
> Joe Lappa
> University of Pittsburgh

We should get some of your people and our people together for lunch 
sometime. We have a small group of three working on a new network 
architecture, if you have a similar group, it would be nice to see what 
things you have been doing, what has worked, what hasn't, and vice 
versa. Let me know.

Peter Hill
Network Engineer
Carnegie Mellon University

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