Information About IP Tunnels
IP tunnels can encapsulate a same-layer or higher-layer protocol and transport the result over IP through a tunnel created between two devices.
IP tunnels consists of the following three main components:
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Passenger protocol—The protocol that needs to be encapsulated. IPv4 is an example of a passenger protocol.
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Carrier protocol—The protocol that is used to encapsulate the passenger protocol. Cisco NX-OS supports generic routing encapsulation (GRE), and IP-in-IP encapsulation and decapsulation as carrier protocols.
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Transport protocol—The protocol that is used to carry the encapsulated protocol. IPv4 is an example of a transport protocol.
An IP tunnel takes a passenger protocol, such as IPv4, and encapsulates that protocol within a carrier protocol, such as GRE. The device then transmits this carrier protocol over a transport protocol, such as IPv4.
You configure a tunnel interface with matching characteristics on each end of the tunnel.
You must enable the tunnel feature before you can configure it.
GRE Tunnels
You can use GRE as the carrier protocol for a variety of passenger protocols. The selection of tunnel interfaces can also be based on the PBR policy.
The figure shows the IP tunnel components for a GRE tunnel. The original passenger protocol packet becomes the GRE payload and the device adds a GRE header to the packet. The device then adds the transport protocol header to the packet and transmits it.
Point-to-Point IP-in-IP Tunnel Encapsulation and Decapsulation
Point-to-point IP-in-IP encapsulation and decapsulation is a type of tunnel that you can create to send encapsulated packets from a source tunnel interface to a destination tunnel interface. The selection of these tunnel interfaces can also be based on the PBR policy. This type of tunnel will carry both inbound and outbound traffic.
Multi-Point IP-in-IP Tunnel Decapsulation
Multi-point IP-in-IP decapsulate-any is a type of tunnel that you can create to decapsulate packets from any number of IP-in-IP tunnels to one tunnel interface. This tunnel will not carry any outbound traffic. However, any number of remote tunnel endpoints can use a tunnel configured this way as their destination.