VRF Question

kevin.hu · ‎03-16-2007

Does VRF depends on MPLS or they are separate entity?

Here is the senario, my client is co-lo with us at our spoke site, our spoke router is a 2620XM router and has a T1 link connect to our hub. To separate our my client's traffic, I run VRF on 2620XM. So my question is, do I need to enable MPLS on 2620XM in order to have VRF work? How does VRF traffic reach the hub? via MP-BGP?

rajju · ‎03-16-2007

Hello:

From what I have read and understood: MPLS and MPLS/VRF-Lite are 2 different entities.

You can enable MPLS in all your routers without enabling a VRF or you can enable just VRF-Lite without enabling MPLS.

The only "problem" with just VRF-Lite is it is used only b/w 2 directly connected routers: ex. in a hub-site with site-to-site and internet connectivity etc. to segregate traffic b/w different routers/interfaces.

I am sure the other pros in this forum will have clearer and better answers for you.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards.

kevin.hu · ‎03-16-2007

To make myself clear, we have a hub-spoke design. A different company is merging their network with us because they share a lot of sites with us. So they want to ride their traffic on our circuits and they will get rid of all their WAN circuits to save money. They would like to connect their spoke routers on our spoke routers via Ethernet interface. And then we run VRF on our spoke routers. So how do I transport this VRF traffic from site 1 to site 2? Do I run VRF lite only on my spoke router or I need to run MPLS, VRF lite, MP-BGP on my spoke router? router?