It IS pretty straight forward, except for the fact that in GNS3, I used a single serial interface with 2 sub interfaces to another router. HDLC, nothing fancy, but wasn't able to ping on the sub-interfaces. I ended up making a separate physical connection for R3 to R1 and my configuration worked.
On point, this lab demonstrated the use of VRF lite to use a Managed CE with sub interfaces to the PE and segment traffic.
