MPLS and CEF

[s.mowrer]

I recently completed a five node MPLS WAN for a customer. The MPLS provider is one of the well known national ones and each site had its own AS number. Each site was EBGP neighbored with the providers core AS. To

get the whole thing to work as a fully meshed network we had to turn off CEF and no ip route cache in each router that was connect to the WAN. This was done under the instructions of the providers engineer.

Is this normal for this kind of WAN implementation? I can find articles about MPLS and CEF pertaining to PE

equipment but can't find any knowledgeable material about why CE routers switching process has to be dumbed down to where they are now doing process switching. Thanks for any insight here.

[nisha_kulkarni]

If u r running some routing Protocol which is EBGP in case of ur scenario, there's absolutely no need of enabling CEF as such. Would be highly thankful if u post some of ur configs here...

Regards,

NISHA

[Harold Ritter]

I see no reason for your provider to ask you to disable CEF on the CE. This is certainly not a requirement and can have an impact on the performance of the box or prevent the utilization of some features.

What was the explanation offered by the SP engineer to do such a thing. If they didn't provide you with an explanation, I would definitely ask for one.

Hope this helps,