a0000.blogspot.com: BGP Link Bandwidth

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

BGP Link Bandwidth

BGP Link Bandwidth

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Link Bandwidth feature is used to advertise the bandwidth of an autonomous system exit link as an extended community. This feature is configured for links between directly connected external BGP (eBGP) neighbors. The link bandwidth extended community attribute is propagated to iBGP peers when extended community exchange is enabled. This feature is used with BGP multipath features to configure load balancing over links with unequal bandwidth.

Prerequisites for BGP Link Bandwidth

•BGP load balancing or multipath load balancing must be configured before this feature is enabled.

•BGP extended community exchange must be enabled between iBGP neighbors to which the link bandwidth attribute is to be advertised.

•Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) or distributed CEF (dCEF) must be enabled on all participating routers.

Restrictions for BGP Link Bandwidth

•This feature can be configured only under IPv4 and VPNv4 address family sessions.

•BGP can originate the link bandwidth community only for directly connected links to eBGP neighbors.

•Both iBGP and eBGP load balancing are supported in IPv4 and VPNv4 address families. However, eiBGP load balancing is supported only in VPNv4 address-family.

Information About BGP Link Bandwidth

To configure the BGP Link Bandwidth feature, you must understand the following concept:

• BGP Link Bandwidth Overview

• Link Bandwidth Extended Community Attribute

• Benefits of the BGP Link Bandwidth Feature

BGP Link Bandwidth Overview

The BGP Link Bandwidth feature used to enable multipath load balancing for external links with unequal bandwidth capacity. This feature is enabled under an IPv4 or VPNv4 address family sessions by entering the bgp dmzlink-bw command. This feature supports both iBGP, eBGP multipath load balancing, and eiBGP multipath load balancing in Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). When this feature is enabled, routes learned from directly connected external neighbor are propagated through the internal BGP (iBGP) network with the bandwidth of the source external link.

The link bandwidth extended community indicates the preference of an autonomous system exit link in terms of bandwidth. This extended community is applied to external links between directly connected eBGP peers by entering the neighbor dmzlink-bw command. The link bandwidth extended community attribute is propagated to iBGP peers when extended community exchange is enabled with the neighbor send-community command.

Link Bandwidth Extended Community Attribute

The link bandwidth extended community attribute is a 4-byte value that is configured for a link that on the demilitarized zone (DMZ) interface that connects two single hop eBGP peers. The link bandwidth extended community attribute is used as a traffic sharing value relative to other paths while forwarding traffic. Two paths are designated as equal for load balancing if the weight, local-pref, as-path length, Multi Exit Discriminator (MED), and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) costs are the same.

Benefits of the BGP Link Bandwidth Feature

The BGP Link Bandwidth feature allows BGP to be configured to send traffic over multiple iBGP or eBGP learned paths where the traffic that is sent is proportional to the bandwidth of the links that are used to exit the autonomous system. The configuration of this feature can be used with eBGP and iBGP multipath features to enable unequal cost load balancing over multiple links. Unequal cost load balancing over links with unequal bandwidth was not possible in BGP before the BGP Link Bandwidth feature was introduced.