Extreme Networks Alcatel Tellabs SBC Communications This document describes a methodology for testing the operation, administration and maintenance (OA&M) of a general VPN service, that is applied here to Hierarchical Virtual Private LAN Services (HVPLS) as described in [VPLS]. As part of this methodology, the MPLS ping concepts described in [LSP-PING] are extended to enable HVPLS spoke- to-spoke connectivity testing. The approaches to identifying OAM packets has also been made compatible with [LSP-PING] and [PWE3-VCCV]. These are the goals of this draft: - checking connectivity between 'service-aware' nodes of a network, - verifying data plane and control plane integrity, - verifying service membership There are two specific requirements to which we call attention because of their seemingly contradictory nature: - the checking of connectivity MUST involve the ability to use packets that look like customer packets - the OAM packets MUST not propagate beyond the boundary of the provider network