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. A method to provide the information necessary for this spoke-to-spoke OA&M is also proposed. 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