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Dual PIM Multicast VPNs: Draft Rosen

 

Junos OS supports Layer 3 VPNs based on the Internet draft draft-rosen-rfc2547bis, BGP/MPLS VPNs. This Internet draft defines a mechanism by which service providers can use their IP backbones to provide Layer 3 VPN services to their customers. The sites that make up a Layer 3 VPN are connected over a provider’s existing public Internet backbone.

VPNs based on draft-rosen-rfc2547bis are also known as BGP/MPLS VPNs because BGP is used to distribute VPN routing information across the provider’s backbone, and MPLS is used to forward VPN traffic across the backbone to remote VPN sites.

Note

Draft-rosen multicast VPNs are not supported in a logical system environment even though the configuration statements can be configured under the logical-systems hierarchy.

Customer networks, because they are private, can use either public addresses or private addresses, as defined in RFC 1918, Address Allocation for Private Internets. When customer networks that use private addresses connect to the public Internet infrastructure, the private addresses might overlap with the private addresses used by other network users. BGP/MPLS VPNs solve this problem by prefixing a VPN identifier to each address from a particular VPN site, thereby creating an address that is unique both within the VPN and within the public Internet. In addition, each VPN has its own VPN-specific routing table that contains the routing information for that VPN only.

In a unicast environment for Layer 3 VPNs, all VPN states are contained within the provider edge (PE) routers. With multicast over Layer 3 VPNs, two PIM adjacencies are established: one between the customer edge (CE) and PE routers through a VPN routing and forwarding (VRF) routing instance, the second between the main PE routers and their service provider core neighbors.

The set of primary PIM adjacencies throughout the service provider’s network makes up the forwarding path, and eventually forms a rendezvous point (RP) multicast distribution tree. The tree is rooted at the RP contained within the service provider’s network. Because of this, core provider transit routers within the service provider’s network must maintain multicast state information for the VPNs.

For multicast in Layer 3 VPNs to work correctly, there must be two types of rendezvous points. The VPN customer rendezvous point (VPN C-RP) is an RP that resides within a VPN that connects the segments of a customer network. The service provider rendezvous point (SP-RP) resides within the service provider network itself. Because a PE router connects to both the customer network and the service provider network, a PE router can act as an SP-RP, a VPN C-RP, or both.

Note

If you configure auto-RP or bootstrap router (BSR) on a PE router, the PE router cannot act as a VPN C-RP in a routing instance, but can learn about another router acting as the VPN C-RP.