Is it possible for a customer router to announce routes to the provider edge of an MPLS / VRF network?

RouterOS Forwarding Protocols
1

Hi all,

I’ve setup a BGP / MPLS / VRF network as per the wiki http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Layer-3_MPLS_VPN_example , where customers announce their routes via OSPF.

Is it possible for a customer to announce their routes via BGP?

Also, what is the ‘proper’, real world way to do this?

2

It is very common for a customer to peer with an MPLS PE router via BGP and announce routes. Really depends on how you are going to build the VRFs. Are you going to be concerned only with public transit or will you be providing private transit as well?

3

I found this entry in the wiki which covers how to set this up - http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:EBGP_as_PE-CE_routing_protocol

I’m interested in both options, private and public transit. This is just for labbing currently, to get a better understanding of the technologies. I guess ideally I’d like to build a full ISP style network, that can provide Public, Private, and L2 style connections to customers.

Thanks

4

In that case, I would probably build a VRF for the Internet (or put it in the main table) and then build one or more VRFs for private transit and then hand those off to the customer on two separate ports on the equip at the customer prem or via dot1q tags if needed.

5

Thanks for the pointers. One more question if you don’t mind, is there any reason to put public transit inside a VRF?

6

Vrf is always an easy way to control who speaks to whom, which may be easier than using a lot of firewall rules to shield your router loopbacks from customers.
But then, a lot of networks do both management and Internet routing in the global routing domain and protect management with acls.