Leaning VPLS on Mikrotik and can’t seem to understand how we might implement customer VLANs over a VPLS service.
For example, I want to create a VPLS connection between two sites, bridge the VPLS service to an Ethernet port on my PE, and then allow my customer to send me traffic on any VLAN they like. I will transport that traffic from A to B and maintain the VLAN tag.
Packet In (Tagged with unknown vlan X) → ether1 → bridge (on PE1) → VPLS → bridge (on PE2) → ether 1 → Packet Out (tagged with the same unknown vlan X)
Well, you can encapsulate customers vlans into yours one and strip the header off of yours vlan at other end of vpls tunnel. Then all traffic inside will flow into interface, which belongs to the corresponding vlan interface with vpls interface inside your bridge. Try this one.
Just set it up as you had it, bridge an Ethernet port to a vpls interface and then the same on the other PE router.
Herewith a sample VPLS interface adding command:
add advertised-l2mtu=4374 comment=“Customer - City - Head Office - Primary:” disabled=no l2mtu=4374 name=vpls-cust-city remote-peer=x.x.x.x vpls-id=5:8
Don’t specify vpls interface mac address, it gets generated automatically and needs to be unique per interface. L2MTU needs to be smaller than medium between the sites, by the VPLS overhead (26 bytes = 14 bytes for encapsulated src & dst mac, 4 bytes for VPLS and 2 x 4 byte MPLS headers). In the example above you would need to be able to ‘ping x.x.x.x do-not-fragment size=4400’ between your PEs.
You can even transport low level BPDUs such as LACP control frames by setting bridge with ‘protocol-mode=none’. This way you could route two VPLS tunnels between sites and your customer could connect the hand off ports directly to their switches on either side and run LACP end-to-end.