The BFD-VRF Support feature enables Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) support for Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) on Provider Edge (PE) and Customer Edge (CE) devices to provide fast detection of routing protocol failures between the devices.

A BFD client establishes a Virtual Private Networking (VPN) session with devices that have BFD configured on them before requesting for session monitoring. However, there are no route lookups to determine whether a BFD neighbor is connected to the same VPN session or a different one. BFD relies on its client to get information about the VPN session to monitor the associated neighbor device. All information about VPN sessions is used to forward BFD control packets to the appropriate VPN through Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF).