MikroTik ISP Design: Building an 802.1q trunk between sites using VPLS and S-tag
Use Case
ISPs that use MikroTik are always looking for new ways to deliver services to customers and expand their offerings. Delivering Layer 2 at scale for customers is a design challenge that comes up frequently.
While it’s easy enough to build a VLAN nested inside of another VLAN (see below), this requires you to build all of the VLANs a customer wants to use into the PE router or handoff switch.
However, if you have a client that needs a layer 2 service delivered to two or more points and wants to be able to treat it just like an 802.1q trunk and add VLANs in an ad-hoc way, then using the S-Tag feature in RouterOS along with VPLS transport is a great option.
What’s the S-tag do???
Clients will often ask me “what’s the S-Tag check box for?”
So a little background on this, there is a protocol for using outer and inner VLAN tags specified in IEEE 802.1ad that uses Service Tag (or S-Tag) to denote the outer VLAN tag used to transport Customer Tags (or C-Tags).
What makes the S-Tag/C-Tag a little bit different is that it actually changes the ethertype of the Frame.
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