MPLS Pseudowire ePipe Interop — Nokia 7750 and Cisco 7200 on GNS3
Introduction
Not long ago, network equipment testing involves a lot of coordination with your colleagues to share and wire up the equipment in the lab before any testing can be started. With the popularity of network virtualization, all major vendors now offer virtualized version of their equipment in one form or another and many simple network equipment testing can now be simulated/emulated on a Windows PC.
This article describes how to setup GNS3 on a Windows PC to simulate/emulate an MPLS Pseudowire ePipe service between a Nokia 7750 and a Cisco 7200 routers. The only hardware required to run this interop testing is just a Windows PC with 8 or 16GB RAM. Nokia’s SROS and Cisco’s IOS configs and commands are shown in this article to illustrate and verify the operations of the MPLS ePipe service between the two routers running on GNS3 on a Windows PC. Basic MPLS Pseudowire operations using the MPLS Transport and Service Labels to setup the MPLS Transport and Service Tunnels respectively are explained alongside with the configuration. Also, the built-in Wireshark of GNS3 allows very easy protocol packet capture and analysis for troubleshooting and training purposes.
The following shows the network setup diagram on GNS3 for the MPLS ePipe service between a Nokia 7750 and a Cisco 7200 routers:
An MPLS Pseudowire ePipe is set up between the Nokia 7750’s SAP 1/1/4 and the Cisco 7200’s FE1/1. Two virtual PCs namely PC77 and PC99 are connected to the two ends of the ePipe. If everything works, the two virtual PCs should be able to ping to each other via the ePipe over the MPLS network .
The following shows the hardware and software I used in the inter-op test:
- Windows 10 PC (i5 6500 CPU with 16GB RAM). 8GB RAM should be enough
- GNS3 version 1.5.2
- Cisco 7200 image — c7200-advipservicesk9-mz.152–4.S5.image
- Nokia 7750 image — SROS 13.0.qcow2
- VMWare Workstation Pro 12.5.2. The free VMWare Workstation 12 Player should work…
