9.

6 Designing Service Provider-Managed VPNs

Route Distinguishers 

In MPLS VPN, the PE router provides isolation between customers by using VRFs. The
prefixes are propagated to the other PE routers with MP-BGP. The problem is that the
prefixes must be unique. If the customer has overlapping IP addressing, this situation would
cause a problem for BGP. To solve this problem, the concept of RD was conceived.

An overview of route distinguishers follows:

 The RD allows overlapping addresses from different customers.

 The RD is 64-bit unique identifier.
 The RD is prepended to the IPv4 prefix to create the VPNv4 address.
 VPNv4 addresses are exchanged only between PE routers.

The basic idea behind the RD is that every customer receives a unique identifier to
distinguish between the same prefix from different customers. To create a unique prefix, the
RD is combined with the IPv4 prefix. The combination is called a VPNv4 prefix. MP-BGP
needs to carry these VPNv4 prefixes between the PE routers.

An RD is a 64-bit unique identifier. It is prepended to the 32-bit customer prefix that is

learned from the CE router. The combination of the RD and the prefix is therefore 96 bits
long. There are two formats for the RD. The first one is ASN:nn, in which the ASN
represents the autonomous system number and nn represents a number. The second format is
IP-address:nn. The first format is the most commonly used.

VPNv4 addresses are exchanged only between PE routers. They are never used between CE
routers.

RD operations in MPLS VPN

In the figure, the PE router receives the same IP prefix from two different customers. The
prefixes are installed into the VRF routing table for each customer. When the PE router
propagates these two routes to the other PE routers, it prepends the customer RD to make
unique VPNv4 routes. When other PE routers receive these routes, they strip the RDs from
the VPNv4 prefix and install the routes into the VRF routing table for each customer. The
IPv4 prefix is then forwarded to the CE routers.