Configuration guidelines

Follow these guidelines when you configure a tunnel policy:

If you configure both methods for a tunnel policy, the tunnel policy selects tunnels in the following steps:

  1. If the destination address of a preferred tunnel identifies a peer PE, the tunnel policy uses the preferred tunnel to forward traffic destined for the peer PE without using any other tunnels.

  2. If not, the tunnel policy selects tunnels as configured by the select-seq load-balance-number command.

Figure 31: MPLS VPN tunnel selection diagram

As shown in Figure 31, PE 1 and PE 2 have multiple tunnels in between and they are connected to multiple MPLS VPNs. You can control the paths for VPN traffic by using one of the following methods:

The second method distributes traffic of a single VPN to multiple tunnels. The transmission delays on different tunnels can greatly vary. Therefore, the destination device or the upper layer application might take a great time to sequence the packets. HP recommends not using the second method.