Overheard a network engineer say MPLS is dead for campus environments, that got me thinking

I was at a Cisco user group meetup in St. Louis last Tuesday and one guy was pretty adamant that MPLS doesn't make sense anymore for most campus setups. He said SD-Access and EVPN-VXLAN are taking over completely now. My team has been running MPLS for our main office (about 800 users) for 3 years now and it's been rock solid. Is MPLS really on its way out for campus, or was this guy just pushing newer tech he sells? Has anyone here actually made the switch from MPLS to something else and regretted it?

2 comments

2 Comments

thomas_scott17d ago

My buddy over at a state university has been running MPLS on campus for around 5 years now. He told me last month their network team got pressured by a vendor to switch to EVPN-VXLAN. They spent a whole summer migrating one building and it honestly turned into a nightmare. Lots of weird routing issues, some staff couldn't connect to certain servers for weeks. He said they ended up rolling half of it back because the new setup just wasn't as stable for their old gear. Take that with a grain of salt since every environment is different, but I'd be real careful thinking MPLS is dead just because some sales guy says so.

the_wesley17d ago

That university story matches what I have seen too. I know three IT directors in the Kansas City area who tested EVPN-VXLAN on small sections of their campus and none of them kept it long term because troubleshooting became a real headache. Some vendors talk like MPLS is done, but for a lot of us running medium sized sites with mixed gear, it still just works without all the extra complexity.