Cisco IOS release 15.1(1)XB introduces some LISP features. LISP is a relatively new protocol whose aim is to separate two functions contained within an IP address. A host IP address contains both the Endpoint Identifier (EID) and the Routing Locator (RLOC). What this basically means is that the IP address not only indicates the specific host, but also indicates how to locate the host on an IP network.
LISP is just one of the latest examples of abstracting a problem in order to more easily solve it. Think about how the DNS solved an early problem: human inability to remember large amounts of unstructured data in the form of IP addresses. Is it easier to remember 74.125.53.121 or http://www.ccde-study.com? In effect, the DNS decoupled the EID (74.125.53.121) and locator (the name).
The problem is that IPv4 has no way of separating the host from the path. If you trace the route to a host with IP address 10.1.1.1, each intermediate hop uses the host IP address in order to find out which interface to egress the packet. This presents a few problems:
- Mobility
- Scalability
- Multihoming
You can get started with LISP using the following guides from Cisco:
LISP Lab Testing Application Note
Cisco IOS LISP Configuration Guide
And here’s a good article from the IP Journal.
Unfortunately they haven’t implemented all of the interesting parts of LISP, but you can see how a gateway router performs the map & encap function. I just tried it in a lab and it works great.
For a deeper discussion on the challenges presented by IP, I highly recommend reading Patterns In Network Architecture by Jon Day.
nice one
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Thanks for pointing to LISP. We're very excited about the functionality that it enables – including some mentioned here (ease of multi-homing, mobility, scalability), and IPv6 transition support. You can find more information at lisp4.cisco.com and – oh yeah! you'll actually be "using" lisp at the same time!
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