BGP in virtual routers

BGP configuration and monitoring in VRF

Usually, BGP router is configured in VR main. To handle virtual routers, a separate VRF can be specified. The routes learnt and configured will be stored in the corresponding forwarding tables. It is possible to create multiple BGP instances on the same machine.

• Create a BGP instance on a VRF named customer1, by using following command:

vrf customer 1
  routing bgp
    as 54
    ..
  ..

Then you can continue the configuration as usual. The BGP peering and the redistribution will happen on the whole VRF. All configured interfaces with addresses, and routing information on that VRF will be used.

To get routing information about BGP in that VR instance, you can use following command, that will dump all the instances configured.

vrouter> show bgp vrfs
Type  Id     routerId       #PeersVfg  #PeersEstb  Name  L3-VNI  Rmac
DFLT 0      192.168.0.162      2         1  Default       0   00:00:00:00:00:00
VRF  2      0.0.0.0            0           0 customer1     0   00:00:00:00:00:00
VRF  3      1.1.1.1            0           0 customer2     0   00:00:00:00:00:00

To get more information on a specific VRF, you can use following command, and the VRF name to get routing information:

vrouter> show bgp vrf customer1 ipv4 unicast
BGP table version is 2, local router ID is 1.1.1.1, vrf id 2
Status codes:  s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, = multipath,
    i internal, r RIB-failure, S Stale, R Removed
Nexthop codes: @NNN nexthop's vrf id, < announce-nh-self
Origin codes:  i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete
Network          Next Hop            Metric LocPrf Weight Path
*> 3.3.3.0/24       0.0.0.0                  0         32768 i
*> 4.4.4.0/24       0.0.0.0                  0         32768 i
Displayed  2 routes and 2 total paths

BGP use case for VRF

A common use case is to provide a per customer BGP peering. This use case can happen, when several customers share physical resources of a machine, but are isolated by means of either physical interfaces or VLAN interfaces. The following configuration gives an overview on how to create multiple BGP instances tighted with VLAN interfaces.

As you can see on below example, 2 instances of BGP are created, each one run over VLAN interface with its own peer. The same autonomous system can be used for all the instances. The BGP contexts share the same system process but will not share the same forwarding information.

vrf customer1
  routing bgp
    as 65555
    router-id 192.168.1.1
    neighbor 192.168.1.2 remote-as 65555
    ..
    ..
  interface vlan vlan10
    vlan-id 10
    link-interface eth0_0
    ipv4 address 192.168.1.1/24
    ..
    ..
  ..
vrf customer2
  routing bgp
    as 65555
    router-id 192.168.2.1
    neighbor 192.168.2.2 remote-as 65555
    ..
    ..
  interface vlan vlan20
    vlan-id 20
    link-interface eth0_0
    ipv4 address 192.168.2.0/24
    ..
    ..

Note

With the above example, it could have been possible to use the same IP mapping for both routing entities. An other benefit of having separate entities is that IP mapping can overlap.