352-001 · Question #288
You are designing a large-scale DMVPN network with more than 500 spokes using EIGRP as the IGP protocol. Which design option eliminates potential tunnel down events on the spoke routers due to the hol
The correct answer is D. Increase the hold queue on the tunnel interface of the hub router.. In a large DMVPN deployment, the hub's mGRE tunnel interface output queue becomes exhausted when transmitting EIGRP hellos to hundreds of spokes simultaneously, causing hello drops and holding-time expiration on spoke routers.
Question
You are designing a large-scale DMVPN network with more than 500 spokes using EIGRP as the IGP protocol. Which design option eliminates potential tunnel down events on the spoke routers due to the holding time expiration?
Options
- AIncrease the hold queue on the tunnel interface of the spoke routers.
- BIncrease the hold queue on the physical interface of the spoke routers.
- CIncrease the hold queue on the physical interface of the hub router.
- DIncrease the hold queue on the tunnel interface of the hub router.
- EApply QoS for pak_priority class.
How the community answered
(18 responses)- A11% (2)
- B6% (1)
- C28% (5)
- D56% (10)
Why each option
In a large DMVPN deployment, the hub's mGRE tunnel interface output queue becomes exhausted when transmitting EIGRP hellos to hundreds of spokes simultaneously, causing hello drops and holding-time expiration on spoke routers.
The spoke tunnel interface hold queue governs buffering on the spoke's inbound side; the bottleneck is the hub's inability to drain hellos fast enough to all spokes, not the spokes' ability to receive them.
The spoke's physical interface queue affects traffic arriving from the WAN but is not involved in queuing the EIGRP hellos that the hub generates and sends toward spoke tunnel endpoints.
The hub's physical interface queue processes traffic after it leaves the tunnel interface; EIGRP hellos to spokes are queued and dropped at the tunnel interface before they ever reach the physical interface queue.
The hub's mGRE tunnel interface is a single logical interface that must unicast EIGRP hello packets to all 500+ spoke neighbors concurrently. Under sustained load, the default output hold queue on this interface fills up and discards hellos before they can be transmitted, causing spokes to exceed their EIGRP hold time and tear down the neighbor adjacency. Increasing the hold queue depth on the hub's tunnel interface allows more packets to be buffered before being discarded, preventing hello drops and eliminating the holding-time expiration events observed on spoke routers.
QoS pak_priority class prioritizes control-plane packets during congestion but does not expand the hold queue depth that is exhausted when the hub unicasts hellos to hundreds of spoke tunnel addresses simultaneously.
Concept tested: DMVPN hub tunnel hold queue for EIGRP at scale
Source: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/iproute_eigrp/configuration/xe-16/ire-xe-16-book/ire-dmvpn.html
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