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BGP Auto-Discovered Neighbor (BGP Unnumbered Peering)

This section describes BGP auto-discovered neighbor (also known as BGP unnumbered peering) feature and its configuration on the QFX5220, QFX5230, QFX5240, and QFX5241 Switches.

Overview

The QFX Series Switches in EVPN-VXLAN data center fabrics use BGP auto-discovered neighbors to simplify IPv6 underlay configuration. The switches automatically discover and establish peering sessions with directly connected neighbors using link-local IPv6 addresses. You can use this feature to configure BGP peering by interface rather than by specifying remote or local neighbor IP addresses. Using the IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol to automatically discover link-local addresses of directly connected neighbors, you can simplify deployment and reduce misconfiguration risk.

QFX Series Switches in the EVPN-VXLAN data center fabric support both Internal Border Gateway Protocol (IBGP) for the overlay routing and External Border Gateway Protocol (EBGP) for overlay and underlay routing within spine-and-leaf architecture fabrics. For more information about BGP, see Understanding BGP.

Attention: IPv6 Neighbor Discovery must be enabled and operational on the fabric-facing interfaces for BGP to discover peer link-local addresses. Auto-discovered must be configured on both ends of each link (example, on leaf and spine nodes).

Configure BGP Auto-Discovered Neighbor

Using this feature, you can configure BGP neighbors by interface or interface range, eliminating the need to manually define per-peer IP addresses for each BGP session. It expands your fabric without reconfiguring individual peer addresses, reducing operational complexity, and provisioning errors.

To enable BGP auto-discovered neighbor using IPv6 Neighbor Discovery on a device:

  1. Configure the fabric-facing interfaces with both inet and inet6 address families:

  2. Configure the local autonomous number (AS) number:

  3. Define an AS list to restrict which remote AS numbers are accepted:

    It allows you to define an allowed AS number list so that only neighbors with matching AS numbers can establish BGP sessions, maintaining security without static neighbor definitions.

  4. Enable IPv6 router advertisements (RAs) on the fabric-facing interfaces:

  5. Configure the BGP group with dynamic neighbor autodiscovery:

Note: To dynamically discover IPv6 neighbors, QFX Series Switches use various options like BGP unnumbered peering, IPv6 neighbor discovery protocol (NDP), and so on. The use of dynamic discovery reduces the burden of manually configuring an IPv6 underlay in an EVPN-VXLAN data center fabric. This feature is called as BGP autodiscovery or BGP autopeering.

Verify BGP Auto-Discovered Neighbor Configuration

  • To check whether the fabric interfaces are up and running:

  • To verify that all fabric interfaces are sending and receiving IPv6 router advertisements:

  • To verify that the fabric devices have learned the MAC-to-link-local address bindings of all directly attached IPv6 neighbors using IPv6 neighbor discovery:

  • To verify that all fabric devices have established BGP peering sessions to the directly connected neighbors:

  • To verify that all nodes are advertising their loopback address while learning the loopback address of other nodes: