On 11-jan-05, at 12:51, Philip Smith wrote:
Well, my preference is to start with route reflectors pretty much from day one. Let's face it, one day you will have to migrate that full mesh iBGP to route reflector. Why do the work of migration when you can start off at the beginning using route reflectors. One less job to do, one less potential network disruption, happy customers,...
You're assuming it's disruptive to add route reflection... The trouble with doing this very early is that the reflectors may end up in inconvenient places. And since you need at least two for redundancy, you don't save much in a three or four router setup.
As for guidelines for transition, check out the BGP tutorials which have been given at the recent NANOGs. It's really very simple to do, and you are lucky as you have relatively few routers to migrate.
Yup, very simple: just create two peergroups on the reflectors: one for reflectors and permanently non-client peers and another one for clients. Then assign iBGP peers to the peergroups and you're done. You'll still have some now unnecessary iBGP links between clients but that's ok: no need to remove them.