Cisco Systems 1400 series, 1600R manual Using a Sham-Link to Correct Ospf Backdoor Routing

OSPF Sham-Link Support for MPLS VPN

Feature Overview

Figure 1 OSPF Connectivity Between VPN Client Sites and an MPLS VPN Backbone

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When OSPF is used to connect PE and CE routers, all routing information learned from a VPN site is placed in the VPN routing and forwarding (VRF) instance associated with the incoming interface. The PE routers that attach to the VPN use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to distribute VPN routes to each other. A CE router can then learn the routes to other sites in the VPN by peering with its attached PE router. The MPLS VPN superbackbone provides an additional level of routing hierarchy to interconnect the VPN sites running OSPF.

When OSPF routes are propagated over the MPLS VPN backbone, additional information about the prefix in the form of BGP extended communities (route type, domain ID extended communities) is appended to the BGP update. This community information is used by the receiving PE router to decide the type of link-state advertisement (LSA) to be generated when the BGP route is redistributed to the OSPF PE-CE process. In this way, internal OSPF routes that belong to the same VPN and are advertised over the VPN backbone are seen as interarea routes on the remote sites.

For basic information about how to configure an MPLS VPN, refer to:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios120/120newft/120t/120t5/vpn.htm

Using a Sham-Link to Correct OSPF Backdoor Routing

Although OSPF PE-CE connections assume that the only path between two client sites is across the MPLS VPN backbone, backdoor paths between VPN sites (shown in grey in Figure 2) may exist. If these sites belong to the same OSPF area, the path over a backdoor link will always be selected because OSPF prefers intraarea paths to interarea paths. (PE routers advertise OSPF routes learned over the VPN backbone as interarea paths.) For this reason, OSPF backdoor links between VPN sites must be taken into account so that routing is performed based on policy.

Cisco IOS Release 12.2(8)T

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