On 21/Jun/20 14:58, Baldur Norddahl wrote:

Not really the same. Lets say the best path is through transit 1 but the customer thinks transit 1 sucks balls and wants his egress traffic to go through your transit 2. Only the VRF approach lets every BGP customer, even single homed ones, make his own choices about upstream traffic.

You would be more like a transit broker than a traditional ISP with a routing mix. Your service is to buy one place, but get the exact same product as you would have if you bought from top X transits in your area. Delivered as X distinct BGP sessions to give you total freedom to send traffic via any of the transit providers.

We received such requests years ago, and calculated the cost of complexity vs. BGP communities. In the end, if the customer wants to use a particular upstream on our side, we'd rather setup an EoMPLS circuit between them and they can have their own contract.

Practically, 90% of our traffic is peering. We don't that much with upstreams providers.

This is also the reason you do not actually need any routes in the FIB for each of those transit VRFs. Just a default route because all traffic will unconditionally go to said transit provider. The customer routes would still be there of course.

Glad it works for you. We just found it too complex, not just for the problems it would solve, but also for the parity issues between VRF's and the global table.

Mark.