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BGP failover between two sites?

John Blakley
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

All,

I'm peering with my isp, and they're advertising my block. I have two sites that they'll be peering with. If my main site goes down (for a LONG time like 4 - 6hrs.), I want the block to roll over to the other site. The problem is I don't know of a way to make bgp wait that long. Is this type of scenario one that will require me to call the provider and then have them manually peer the other site when it's a true disaster? I don't want bgp to failover after a minute of disconnection with my main site.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***
1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Talk to your provider and see if you can come up with some appropriate neighbor timers on your peering to the main site.

Timers can be configured at the neighbor level so the provider won't affect other peering within their BGP process, sames goes for your config.

View solution in original post

8 Replies 8

Harold Ritter
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

John,

You could run eBGP with the provider and use a private AS. This way you could control which prefix gets inject where and when from your side without calling the provider.

About waiting for 4 - 6hrs, BGP won't fulfill this requirement but there might be some ways to do this using EEM scripting available in IOS.

Regards

Harold Ritter
Sr Technical Leader
CCIE 4168 (R&S, SP)
harold@cisco.com
México móvil: +52 1 55 8312 4915
Cisco México
Paseo de la Reforma 222
Piso 19
Cuauhtémoc, Juárez
Ciudad de México, 06600
México

Harold,

I've never heard of EEM scripting. Is this like tcl or an expect script? I figure it takes bgp about a minute for failover.

Thanks!

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***

Edison Ortiz
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

If I understand you correctly, you want your internet block to be unreachable for 4-6 hours in case the main site goes down and not rely on the secondary site as a backup?

That's a strange request there John :)

LOL! Yes, I know. :)

The "backup site" is our DR site, but it's only supposed to be used in case of emergencies. We'd have the same public ip block advertised at that site via bgp, but I don't necessarily want it to be used if our site notices a hiccup with our circuit at the main site. I think the best way to handle this is by static routes and calling the provider to have them reroute us if we actually did have a disaster.

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***

Talk to your provider and see if you can come up with some appropriate neighbor timers on your peering to the main site.

Timers can be configured at the neighbor level so the provider won't affect other peering within their BGP process, sames goes for your config.

Edison,

Great suggestion! It looks like what I need. I've got two peers set up on my desk, and I'm playing with these counters. Would I need to configure the timers on both routers to match? Currently I have:

neighbor 192.168.2.1 timers 60 300 300

I figure that if I wanted the router to report it's down after five minutes, then 300 seconds should have done it, but it seems like it's failing over a lot shorter than that.

Thanks!

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***

Yes, match the timers.

c.captari
Level 1
Level 1

What about a static default route to your primary provider with a higher AD than BGP . Whenever bgp peering dies, the static route will kick in sending the traffic into a black hole.

Redistribute the static route into IGP with a lower cost than the bgp one.

Whenever BGP comes back, it will take precedence over the static route. If you want to switch to the backup BGP link, just remove the static route.

That involves some manual work but it's an idea in case SP doesn't want to modify timers.

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