Routers that belong to the same autonomous system (AS) and that exchange BGP updates run internal BGP (IBGP), and routers that belong to different autonomous systems and that exchange BGP updates run external BGP (EBGP). Most configuration commands are the same for configuring EBGP and IBGP. The difference is that the routing updates are exchanged either between autonomous systems (EBGP) or within an AS (IBGP). The figure given below shows a network that is running both EBGP and IBGP.

Before exchanging information with an external AS, BGP ensures that networks within the AS can be reached by defining internal BGP peering among routers within the AS and by redistributing BGP routing information to IGPs that run within the AS, such as IGRP and OSPF.

Routers that run a BGP routing process are often referred to as BGP speakers. BGP uses the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) as its transport protocol (specifically port 179). Two BGP speakers that have a TCP connection to each other for exchanging routing information are known as peers or neighbors. In the above figure, Routers A and B are BGP peers, as are Routers B and C and Routers C and D. The routing information is a series of AS numbers that describe the full path to the destination network. BGP uses this information to construct a loop-free map of autonomous systems.

The network has these characteristics:

• Routers A and B are running EBGP, and Routers B and C are running IBGP. Note that the EBGP peers are directly connected and that the IBGP peers are not. As long as there is an IGP running that allows the two neighbors to reach one another, IBGP peers do not have to be directly connected.

• All BGP speakers within an AS must establish a peer relationship with each other. That is, the BGP speakers within an AS must be fully meshed logically. BGP4 provides two techniques that reduce the requirement for a logical full mesh: confederations and route reflectors.

• AS 200 is a transit AS for AS 100 and AS 300—that is, AS 200 is used to transfer packets between AS 100 and AS 300.

BGP peers initially exchange their full BGP routing tables and then send only incremental updates. BGP peers also exchange keepalive messages (to ensure that the connection is up) and notification messages (in response to errors or special conditions).

In BGP, each route consists of a network number, a list of autonomous systems that information has passed through (the autonomous system path), and a list of other path attributes. The primary function of a BGP system is to exchange network reachability information, including information about the list of AS paths, with other BGP systems. This information can be used to determine AS connectivity, to prune routing loops, and to enforce AS-level policy decisions.

A router or device running Cisco IOS does not select or use an IBGP route unless it has a route available to the next-hop router and it has received synchronization from an IGP (unless IGP synchronization is disabled). When multiple routes are available, BGP bases its path selection on attribute values. See the “Configuring BGP Decision Attributes” section for information about BGP attributes.

BGP Version 4 supports classless interdomain routing (CIDR) so you can reduce the size of your routing tables by creating aggregate routes, resulting in supernets. CIDR eliminates the concept of network classes within BGP and supports the advertising of IP prefixes.

To enable this feature with BGP routing, you need to enable Graceful Restart. When the neighboring router is NSF-capable, and this feature is enabled, the Layer 3 device continues to forward packets from the neighboring router, during the interval when the primary Route Processor (RP) in a device is failing and the backup RP is taking over, or while the primary RP is manually reloaded for a nondisruptive software upgrade.

To enable BGP routing, you establish a BGP routing process and define the local network. Because BGP must completely recognize the relationships with its neighbors, you must also specify a BGP neighbor.

BGP supports two kinds of neighbors: internal and external. Internal neighbors are in the same AS; external neighbors are in different autonomous systems. External neighbors are usually adjacent to each other and share a subnet, but internal neighbors can be anywhere in the same AS.

The switch supports the use of private AS numbers, usually assigned by service providers and given to systems whose routes are not advertised to external neighbors. The private AS numbers are from 64512 to 65535. You can configure external neighbors to remove private AS numbers from the AS path by using the neighbor remove-private-as router configuration command. Then when an update is passed to an external neighbor, if the AS path includes private AS numbers, these numbers are dropped.

If your AS will be passing traffic through it from another AS to a third AS, it is important to be consistent about the routes it advertises. If BGP advertised a route before all routers in the network had learned about the route through the IGP, the AS might receive traffic that some routers could not yet route. To prevent this from happening, BGP must wait until the IGP has propagated information across the AS so that BGP is synchronized with the IGP. Synchronization is enabled by default. If your AS does not pass traffic from one AS to another AS, or if all routers in your autonomous systems are running BGP, you can disable synchronization, which allows your network to carry fewer routes in the IGP and allows BGP to converge more quickly.

Routing policies for a peer include all the configurations that might affect inbound or outbound routing table updates. When you have defined two routers as BGP neighbors, they form a BGP connection and exchange routing information. If you later change a BGP filter, weight, distance, version, or timer, or make a similar configuration change, you must reset the BGP sessions so that the configuration changes take effect.

There are two types of reset, hard reset and soft reset. Cisco IOS Releases 12.1 and later support a soft reset without any prior configuration. To use a soft reset without preconfiguration, both BGP peers must support the soft route refresh capability, which is advertised in the OPEN message sent when the peers establish a TCP session. A soft reset allows the dynamic exchange of route refresh requests and routing information between BGP routers and the subsequent re-advertisement of the respective outbound routing table.

• When soft reset generates inbound updates from a neighbor, it is called dynamic inbound soft reset.

• When soft reset sends a set of updates to a neighbor, it is called outbound soft reset.

A soft inbound reset causes the new inbound policy to take effect. A soft outbound reset causes the new local outbound policy to take effect without resetting the BGP session. As a new set of updates is sent during outbound policy reset, a new inbound policy can also take effect.

The table that is given below lists the advantages and disadvantages hard reset and soft reset.

When a BGP speaker receives updates from multiple autonomous systems that describe different paths to the same destination, it must choose the single best path for reaching that destination. When chosen, the selected path is entered into the BGP routing table and propagated to its neighbors. The decision is based on the value of attributes that the update contains and other BGP-configurable factors.

When a BGP peer learns two EBGP paths for a prefix from a neighboring AS, it chooses the best path and inserts that path in the IP routing table. If BGP multipath support is enabled and the EBGP paths are learned from the same neighboring autonomous systems, instead of a single best path, multiple paths are installed in the IP routing table. Then, during packet switching, per-packet or per-destination 
load-balancing is performed among the multiple paths. The maximum-paths router configuration command controls the number of paths allowed.

These factors summarize the order in which BGP evaluates the attributes for choosing the best path:

1. If the path specifies a next hop that is inaccessible, drop the update. The BGP next-hop attribute, automatically determined by the software, is the IP address of the next hop that is going to be used to reach a destination. For EBGP, this is usually the IP address of the neighbor that is specified by the neighbor remote-as router configuration command. You can disable next-hop processing by using route maps or the neighbor next-hop-self router configuration command.

2. Prefer the path with the largest weight (a Cisco proprietary parameter). The weight attribute is local to the router and not propagated in routing updates. By default, the weight attribute is 32768 for paths that the router originates and zero for other paths. Routes with the largest weight are preferred. You can use access lists, route maps, or the neighbor weight router configuration command to set weights.

3. Prefer the route with the highest local preference. Local preference is part of the routing update and exchanged among routers in the same AS. The default value of the local preference attribute is 100. You can set local preference by using the bgp default local-preference router configuration command or by using a route map.

4. Prefer the route that was originated by BGP running on the local router.

5. Prefer the route with the shortest AS path.

6. Prefer the route with the lowest origin type. An interior route or IGP is lower than a route learned by EGP, and an EGP-learned route is lower than one of unknown origin or learned in another way.

7. Prefer the route with the lowest multi-exit discriminator (MED) metric attribute if the neighboring AS is the same for all routes considered. You can configure the MED by using route maps or by using the default-metric router configuration command. When an update is sent to an IBGP peer, the MED is included.

8. Prefer the external (EBGP) path over the internal (IBGP) path.

9. Prefer the route that can be reached through the closest IGP neighbor (the lowest IGP metric). This means that the router will prefer the shortest internal path within the AS to reach the destination (the shortest path to the BGP next-hop).

10. If the following conditions are all true, insert the route for this path into the IP routing table:

    • Both the best route and this route are external.

    • Both the best route and this route are from the same neighboring autonomous system.

    • Maximum-paths is enabled.

11. If multipath is not enabled, prefer the route with the lowest IP address value for the BGP router ID. The router ID is usually the highest IP address on the router or the loopback (virtual) address, but might be implementation-specific.

Within BGP, route maps can be used to control and to modify routing information and to define the conditions by which routes are redistributed between routing domains. Each route map has a name that identifies the route map (map tag ) and an optional sequence number.

You can filter BGP advertisements by using AS-path filters, such as the as-path access-list global configuration command and the neighbor filter-list router configuration command. You can also use access lists with the neighbor distribute-list router configuration command. Distribute-list filters are applied to network numbers. See the “Controlling Advertising and Processing in Routing Updates” section for information about the distribute-list command.

You can use route maps on a per-neighbor basis to filter updates and to modify various attributes. A route map can be applied to either inbound or outbound updates. Only the routes that pass the route map are sent or accepted in updates. On both inbound and outbound updates, matching is supported based on AS path, community, and network numbers. Autonomous system path matching requires the match as-path access-list route-map command, community based matching requires the match community-list route-map command, and network-based matching requires the ip access-list global configuration command.

You can use prefix lists as an alternative to access lists in many BGP route filtering commands, including the neighbor distribute-list router configuration command. The advantages of using prefix lists include performance improvements in loading and lookup of large lists, incremental update support, easier CLI configuration, and greater flexibility.

Filtering by a prefix list involves matching the prefixes of routes with those listed in the prefix list, as when matching access lists. When there is a match, the route is used. Whether a prefix is permitted or denied is based upon these rules:

• An empty prefix list permits all prefixes.

• An implicit deny is assumed if a given prefix does not match any entries in a prefix list.

• When multiple entries of a prefix list match a given prefix, the sequence number of a prefix list entry identifies the entry with the lowest sequence number.

By default, sequence numbers are generated automatically and incremented in units of five. If you disable the automatic generation of sequence numbers, you must specify the sequence number for each entry. You can specify sequence values in any increment. If you specify increments of one, you cannot insert additional entries into the list; if you choose large increments, you might run out of values.

One way that BGP controls the distribution of routing information based on the value of the COMMUNITIES attribute. The attribute is a way to groups destinations into communities and to apply routing decisions based on the communities. This method simplifies configuration of a BGP speaker to control distribution of routing information.

A community is a group of destinations that share some common attribute. Each destination can belong to multiple communities. AS administrators can define to which communities a destination belongs. By default, all destinations belong to the general Internet community. The community is identified by the COMMUNITIES attribute, an optional, transitive, global attribute in the numerical range from 1 to 4294967200. These are some predefined, well-known communities:

• internet —Advertise this route to the Internet community. All routers belong to it.

• no-export —Do not advertise this route to EBGP peers.

• no-advertise —Do not advertise this route to any peer (internal or external).

• local-as —Do not advertise this route to peers outside the local autonomous system.

Based on the community, you can control which routing information to accept, prefer, or distribute to other neighbors. A BGP speaker can set, append, or modify the community of a route when learning, advertising, or redistributing routes. When routes are aggregated, the resulting aggregate has a COMMUNITIES attribute that contains all communities from all the initial routes.

You can use community lists to create groups of communities to use in a match clause of a route map. As with an access list, a series of community lists can be created. Statements are checked until a match is found. As soon as one statement is satisfied, the test is concluded.

Often many BGP neighbors are configured with the same update policies (that is, the same outbound route maps, distribute lists, filter lists, update source, and so on). Neighbors with the same update policies can be grouped into peer groups to simplify configuration and to make updating more efficient. When you have configured many peers, we recommend this approach.

To configure a BGP peer group, you create the peer group, assign options to the peer group, and add neighbors as peer group members. You configure the peer group by using the neighbor router configuration commands. By default, peer group members inherit all the configuration options of the peer group, including the remote-as (if configured), version, update-source, out-route-map, out-filter-list, out-dist-list, minimum-advertisement-interval, and next-hop-self. All peer group members also inherit changes that are made to the peer group. Members can also be configured to override the options that do not affect outbound updates.

Classless interdomain routing (CIDR) enables you to create aggregate routes (or supernets) to minimize the size of routing tables. You can configure aggregate routes in BGP either by redistributing an aggregate route into BGP or by creating an aggregate entry in the BGP routing table. An aggregate address is added to the BGP table when there is at least one more specific entry in the BGP table.

One way to reduce the IBGP mesh is to divide an autonomous system into multiple subautonomous systems and to group them into a single confederation that appears as a single autonomous system. Each autonomous system is fully meshed within itself and has a few connections to other autonomous systems in the same confederation. Even though the peers in different autonomous systems have EBGP sessions, they exchange routing information as if they were IBGP peers. Specifically, the next hop, MED, and local preference information are preserved. You can then use a single IGP for all of the autonomous systems.

BGP requires that all of the IBGP speakers be fully meshed. When a router receives a route from an external neighbor, it must advertise it to all internal neighbors. To prevent a routing information loop, all IBPG speakers must be connected. The internal neighbors do not send routes that are learned from internal neighbors to other internal neighbors.

With route reflectors, all IBGP speakers need not be fully meshed because another method is used to pass learned routes to neighbors. When you configure an internal BGP peer to be a route reflector, it is responsible for passing IBGP learned routes to a set of IBGP neighbors. The internal peers of the route reflector are divided into two groups: client peers and nonclient peers (all the other routers in the autonomous system). A route reflector reflects routes between these two groups. The route reflector and its client peers form a cluster. The nonclient peers must be fully meshed with each other, but the client peers need not be fully meshed. The clients in the cluster do not communicate with IBGP speakers outside their cluster.

When the route reflector receives an advertised route, it takes one of these actions, depending on the neighbor:

• A route from an external BGP speaker is advertised to all clients and nonclient peers.

• A route from a nonclient peer is advertised to all clients.

• A route from a client is advertised to all clients and nonclient peers. Hence, the clients need not be fully meshed.

Usually a cluster of clients has a single route reflector, and the cluster is identified by the route reflector router ID. To increase redundancy and to avoid a single point of failure, a cluster might have more than one route reflector. In this case, all route reflectors in the cluster must be configured with the same 4-byte cluster ID so that a route reflector can recognize updates from route reflectors in the same cluster. All the route reflectors serving a cluster should be fully meshed and should have identical sets of client and nonclient peers.

Route flap dampening is a BGP feature designed to minimize the propagation of flapping routes across an internetwork. A route is considered to be flapping when it is repeatedly available, then unavailable, then available, then unavailable, and so on. When route dampening is enabled, a numeric penalty value is assigned to a route when it flaps. When a route’s accumulated penalties reach a configurable limit, BGP suppresses advertisements of the route, even if the route is running. The reuse limit is a configurable value that is compared with the penalty. If the penalty is less than the reuse limit, a suppressed route that is up is advertised again.

Dampening is not applied to routes that are learned by IBGP. This policy prevents the IBGP peers from having a higher penalty for routes external to the AS.

Routes that are advertised through the BGP are commonly aggregated to minimize the number of routes that are used and reduce the size of global routing tables. However, common route aggregation can obscure more specific routing information that is more accurate but not necessary to forward packets to their destinations. Routing accuracy is obscured by common route aggregation because a prefix that represents multiple addresses or hosts over a large topological area cannot be accurately reflected in a single route. Cisco software provides several methods by which you can originate a prefix into BGP. Prior to the BGP conditional route injection feature, the existing methods included redistribution and using the network or aggregate-address command. However, these methods assume the existence of more specific routing information (matching the route to be originated) in either the routing table or the BGP table.

BGP conditional route injection allows you to originate a prefix into a BGP routing table without the corresponding match. This feature allows more specific routes to be generated based on administrative policy or traffic engineering information in order to provide more specific control over the forwarding of packets to these more specific routes, which are injected into the BGP routing table only if the configured conditions are met. Enabling this feature will allow you to improve the accuracy of common route aggregation by conditionally injecting or replacing less specific prefixes with more specific prefixes. Only prefixes that are equal to or more specific than the original prefix may be injected. BGP conditional route injection is enabled with the bgp inject-map exist-map command and uses two route maps (inject map and exist map) to install one (or more) more specific prefixes into a BGP routing table. The exist map specifies the prefixes that the BGP speaker will track. The inject map defines the prefixes that will be created and installed into the local BGP table.

Note	Inject maps and exist maps will only match a single prefix per route map clause. To inject additional prefixes, you must configure additional route map clauses. If multiple prefixes are used, the first prefix that is matched will be used.

To address some of the limitations of peer groups such as configuration management, BGP peer templates were introduced to support the BGP update group configuration.

A peer template is a configuration pattern that can be applied to neighbors that share policies. Peer templates are reusable and support inheritance, which allows the network operator to group and apply distinct neighbor configurations for BGP neighbors that share policies. Peer templates also allow the network operator to define complex configuration patterns through the capability of a peer template to inherit a configuration from another peer template.

There are two types of peer templates:

• Peer session templates are used to group and apply the configuration of general session commands that are common to all address family and NLRI configuration modes.

• Peer policy templates are used to group and apply the configuration of commands that are applied within specific address families and NLRI configuration modes.

Peer templates improve the flexibility and enhance the capability of neighbor configuration. Peer templates also provide an alternative to peer group configuration and overcome some limitations of peer groups. BGP peer devices using peer templates also benefit from automatic update group configuration. With the configuration of the BGP peer templates and the support of the BGP dynamic update peer groups, the network operator no longer must configure peer groups in BGP and the network can benefit from improved configuration flexibility and faster convergence.

Note	A BGP neighbor cannot be configured to work with both peer groups and peer templates. A BGP neighbor can be configured to belong only to a peer group or to inherit policies from peer templates.

The following restrictions apply to the peer policy templates:

• A peer policy template can directly or indirectly inherit up to eight peer policy templates.

• A BGP neighbor cannot be configured to work with both peer groups and peer templates. A BGP neighbor can be configured to belong only to a peer group or to inherit policies only from peer templates.

The inheritance capability is a key component of peer template operation. Inheritance in a peer template is similar to node and tree structures that are commonly found in general computing, for example, file and directory trees. A peer template can directly or indirectly inherit the configuration from another peer template. The directly inherited peer template represents the tree in the structure. The indirectly inherited peer template represents a node in the tree. Because each node also supports inheritance, branches can be created that apply the configurations of all indirectly inherited peer templates within a chain back to the directly inherited peer template or the source of the tree.

This structure eliminates the need to repeat configuration statements that are commonly reapplied to groups of neighbors because common configuration statements can be applied once and then indirectly inherited by peer templates that are applied to neighbor groups with common configurations. Configuration statements that are duplicated separately within a node and a tree are filtered out at the source of the tree by the directly inherited template. A directly inherited template overwrites any indirectly inherited statements that are duplicated in the directly inherited template.

Inheritance expands the scalability and flexibility of neighbor configuration by allowing you to chain together peer templates configurations to create simple configurations that inherit common configuration statements or complex configurations that apply specific configuration statements along with common inherited configurations. Specific details about configuring inheritance in peer session templates and peer policy templates are provided in the following sections.

When BGP neighbors use inherited peer templates, it can be difficult to determine which policies are associated with a specific template. The detail keyword of the show ip bgp template peer-policy command displays the detailed configuration of local and inherited policies that are associated with a specific template.

Peer session templates are used to group and apply the configuration of general session commands to groups of neighbors that share session configuration elements. General session commands that are common for neighbors that are configured in different address families can be configured within the same peer session template. Peer session templates are created and configured in peer session configuration mode. Only general session commands can be configured in a peer session template. The following general session commands are supported by peer session templates:

• description

• disable-connected-check

• ebgp-multihop

• exit peer-session

• inherit peer-session

• local-as

• password

• remote-as

• shutdown

• timers

• translate-update

• update-source

• version

General session commands can be configured once in a peer session template and then applied to many neighbors through the direct application of a peer session template or through indirect inheritance from a peer session template. The configuration of peer session templates simplifies the configuration of general session commands that are commonly applied to all neighbors within an autonomous system.

Peer session templates support direct and indirect inheritance. A peer can be configured with only one peer session template at a time, and that peer session template can contain only one indirectly inherited peer session template.

Note	If you attempt to configure more than one inherit statement with a single peer session template, an error message will be displayed.

This behavior allows a BGP neighbor to directly inherit only one session template and indirectly inherit up to seven additional peer session templates. This allows you to apply up to a maximum of eight peer session configurations to a neighbor: the configuration from the directly inherited peer session template and the configurations from up to seven indirectly inherited peer session templates. Inherited peer session configurations are evaluated first and applied starting with the last node in the branch and ending with the directly applied peer session template configuration at the source of the tree. The directly applied peer session template will have priority over inherited peer session template configurations. Any configuration statements that are duplicated in inherited peer session templates will be overwritten by the directly applied peer session template. So, if a general session command is reapplied with a different value, the subsequent value will have priority and overwrite the previous value that was configured in the indirectly inherited template. The following examples illustrate the use of this feature.

In the following example, the general session command remote-as 1 is applied in the peer session template named SESSION-TEMPLATE-ONE:

template peer-session SESSION-TEMPLATE-ONE 
 remote-as 1
 exit peer-session

Peer session templates support only general session commands. BGP policy configuration commands that are configured only for a specific address family or NLRI configuration mode are configured with peer policy templates.

Peer policy templates are used to group and apply the configuration of commands that are applied within specific address families and NLRI configuration mode. Peer policy templates are created and configured in peer policy configuration mode. BGP policy commands that are configured for specific address families are configured in a peer policy template. The following BGP policy commands are supported by peer policy templates:

• advertisement-interval

• allowas-in

• as-override

• capability

• default-originate

• distribute-list

• dmzlink-bw

• exit-peer-policy

• filter-list

• inherit peer-policy

• maximum-prefix

• next-hop-self

• next-hop-unchanged

• prefix-list

• remove-private-as

• route-map

• route-reflector-client

• send-community

• send-label

• soft-reconfiguration

• unsuppress-map

• weight

Peer policy templates are used to configure BGP policy commands that are configured for neighbors that belong to specific address families. Like peer session templates, peer policy templates are configured once and then applied to many neighbors through the direct application of a peer policy template or through inheritance from peer policy templates. The configuration of peer policy templates simplifies the configuration of BGP policy commands that are applied to all neighbors within an autonomous system.

Like a peer session template, a peer policy template supports inheritance. However, there are minor differences. A directly applied peer policy template can directly or indirectly inherit configurations from up to seven peer policy templates. So, a total of eight peer policy templates can be applied to a neighbor or neighbor group. Like route maps, inherited peer policy templates are configured with sequence numbers. Also like a route map, an inherited peer policy template is evaluated starting with the inherit peer-policy statement with the lowest sequence number and ending with the highest sequence number. However, there is a difference; a peer policy template will not collapse like a route map. Every sequence is evaluated, and if a BGP policy command is reapplied with a different value, it will overwrite any previous value from a lower sequence number.

The directly applied peer policy template and the inherit peer-policy statement with the highest sequence number will always have priority and be applied last. Commands that are reapplied in subsequent peer templates will always overwrite the previous values. This behavior is designed to allow you to apply common policy configurations to large neighbor groups and specific policy configurations only to certain neighbors and neighbor groups without duplicating individual policy configuration commands.

Peer policy templates support only policy configuration commands. BGP policy configuration commands that are configured only for specific address families are configured with peer policy templates.

The configuration of peer policy templates simplifies and improves the flexibility of BGP configuration. A specific policy can be configured once and referenced many times. Because a peer policy supports up to eight levels of inheritance, very specific and very complex BGP policies can also be created.

Use the following tasks to create and configure a peer session template:

Use the following tasks to create and configure a peer policy template: