We have been running Traffic Engineering and VPLS on our network for some years. We recently improved the configuration to reduce the time it takes for a VPLS tunnel to failover to a redundant link. THis was done by tweaking traffic engineering interface k-factor and refresh-time values.
/mpls traffic-eng interface
add bandwidth=4Gbps interface=********* k-factor=1 refresh-time=1s
From what I understand there might be better ways to do this, for example using BFD, however we are not quite ready to make use of ROS7 on the MPLS network, all our routers run on 6.48.6
We currently see a lot of "Link downs" or switching between tunnel paths the Primary Path and Secondary Path for the traffic Engineering tunnels. This is not good for network stability as traffic keeps moving between two redundant links.
Our tunnel paths are defined as using the loose hops.
What can we do to improve this situation, what is best practise recommendation for the traffic-eng interface values.
1. We need fast failover of traffic when a link does down
2. We want to avoid constant switching between tunnel paths.
Any ideas welcome
