Poor mans MPLS/VPLS?

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi All,

I’m coming from a fairly basic networking background here so apologies upfront…

I have a situation where I’d like to span/extend VLANs across multiple sites in a sort of mesh network. Upon extensive reading it seems MPLS or VPLS is the best option to achieve this yet a managed VPLS service is cost prohibitive.

Can I achieve a private MPLS network using RouterOS? (I searched and believe EoIP could facilitate?)
Do we need to request particular upstream provider services to implement? (I guess what I’m after is a set of devices to ‘plug’ into the ‘Internet’ to provide ‘tunnelling’)

Thanks in advance.

2

You may want to look at MikroTik’s Ethernet-over-IP.

3

Yes you can use MPLS/VPLS on RouterOS to achieve what you want.

You should read up on BGP based VPLS http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:BGP_based_VPLS

4

This statement is what made me suggest EoIP. It doesn’t sound like he owns all of the backhaul. If not, he can’t run MPLS across another provider’s network. EoIP will have to do.

5

Thanks blake,

Correct, we just have basic internet services.

With EoIP it looks like it’s point to point. I assume it can be setup in a hub & spoke configuration to form the mesh like topology we’re after? That would be less administration effort than building links between all nodes.

Cheers.