MPLS & Vlans - Basic question

[louis0001]

We have 2 types of connection into our MPLS network.

One is via ethernet & the other is via ADSL which enters the MPLS network at our ISP's exchange.

Would I be right in assuming that any vlan tags on the ethernet connection will be intact entering and leaving the MPLS network whereas the ADSL connected tags will be stripped prior to entering the MPLS network?

[rais]

Ethernet tags are stripped on a non-MPLS IP network. The same should hold true for MPLS based networks. There is no need to carry VLAN tag end-to-end unless you are doing EoMPLS.

HTH.

[Mark Pace Balzan]

Your topology is not very clear to me, however the only way that vlans may not be stripped is if you have a trunk port or using QinQ. I doubt your adsl link sends out tagged frames however. You can verify for sure by taking a packet trace

Hope this helps

Mark

[Alessio Andreoli]

Hi Louis,

you can't generally state that. It really depends on the nature of the links in the middle and the policy for your customer to go out via the ISP. If you devliver (for example) native IP packets at the ISP's exchange there is no MPLS involvement in it. If instead you are delivering an L2VPN + Interworking IP i would assume that both ETH VLAN and ATM would be stripped off at the exchange. Much depends from the overall design. A couple more of different cases would be L3VPN on an Inter-AS design.

Alessio