This defines the relative holding priority of the VC in a lowest-to-highest fashion where 0 is the highest priority, VCs with equal priority are treated equally, and a dropped VC is set dormant; this value is significant only if there are competing resources and the implementation supports the feature. This is the counterpart to setup priority that governs whether an already-established, currently active pseudowire can be preempted later by some other VC being newly signaled with higher priority, so pairing a low holding priority value with a low setup priority protects a critical, already-running pseudowire from being bumped mid-service. For example, a premium VC left at the default holding priority of 7 despite having setup priority 0 could still be preempted after it is already up and passing traffic, once a new competing VC with a lower holding-priority value is signaled and needs the same resources.