Enjoy!

BR
Mohamed El-Zeftawy

Thank you very much, I am glade that you have enjoyed the article and found it useful.

Well I’ve seen this on IOS-XR, if the labeled packet payload was IP packets then; no MPLS labels are used as input to the hashing function, rather like with the pure IP packet case by default the hashing is done based on the 3-tuple hashing algorithm (using L3 information: Source IP address, Destination IP address in addition to the RID), while if we configured the “cef load-balancing fields L4″ command this switches to the 7-tuple hashing algorithm (adding L4 information: Protocol, Source Port, Destination Port in addition to the ingress interface handle). To check the specific path an MPLS packet has taken use the “show mpls forwarding exact-route” command. The final point is, what if we were talking about L2VPN, well in this case the bottommost label and the RID are used in the hashing function.

I hope that I’ve been informative.

Thank you very much for the article, it is crystal clear and well organized,

Can you advice is it possible to use the per port load sharing in MPLS core,

as far as I know that normally the MPLS Ps extracts the original IP header of the packet to use the source and destination IP addresses in the CEF hashing algorithm for efficient load-sharing, so what if one of the below commands applied on a P router, is that will enable per port load sharing for MPLS flows ?? or this is an IP flows only feature.
#ip cef load-sharing algorithm include-ports source destination
or on IOS-XR
#CEF loadbalancing fields L4,

Regards
Mohamed Salah El-Zeftawy

Thank you for taking the time to compose and share this information. This is quite a clear, understandable, and most importantly useful explanation of CEF load balancing, due to the inclusion of actual IOS commands. You have covered the topic from conceptual overview to actual implementation.

Best regards,
Dustin

It’s great piece of info specially on port based load-balancing information. It would be quite useful in VOIP network !!

Thanks for all info !!

Cheers,