Hi,

Look at the following topology which is a bit simplified.

Address families.png

The CE devices are located at the customer. The customer connects to these routers.
For this example the customer is running eBGP with the service provider. If we
start with CE1, CE1 will advertise routes to PE1. PE1 has configured peering to CE1
in the address-family ipv4 vrf customerA. Every VPN will have a VRF where routes
are inserted into.

PE1 has a VPNv4 peering with PE3. In this case we have just two PEs but there would
be many in a real network. In between we have P routers and from PE to P routers
there is MPLS running.

Over this VPNv4 peering the PEs take the routes that are inserted into the VRFs and
advertise these as VPNv4 routes with RD, RT and VPN label as well. This is what is
called a MPLS L3 VPN.

In the lower part of the topology there is regular IPv4 running. CE2 has eBGP
peering with PE2 in the address-family ipv4 unicast. PE2 then has an iBGP peering
with PE4 which advertise the routes learned from the customers. These routes must
be unique because there is no RD here that could be used.

I hope this cleared some doubts.

In case you don't know the abbrevations here is a list:

CE - Customer Edge

PE - Provider Edge

P - Provider

MPLS - Multi Protocol Label Switching

eBGP - external BGP

iBGP - internal BGP

RD - Route Distinguisher

RT - Route Target

VPN - Virtual Private Network.

Daniel Dib
CCIE #37149

Please rate helpful posts.

Daniel Dib CCIE #37149 Please rate helpful posts.