[c-nsp] Internet inside a VRF?

[Jared Mauch]

On Mar 15, 2012, at 9:39 AM, Jason Lixfeld wrote:

> On 2012-03-15, at 8:29 AM, Oliver Boehmer (oboehmer) wrote:
> 
>> useful, yes, but could also be expensive.. the more different services
>> you come up with, the more different routing table views you need to
>> provide, the more VRFs you need, and the more VRFs you have on a PE, the
>> more route duplication (on both control and forwading plane) you need to
>> do.. with the current Internet table size, this quickly becomes a
>> problem.
> 
> It's only expensive supposing you duplicate the Internet routing table a whole heap of times.  If Internet goes right into a VRF and you have two more VRFs with, say, < 200 routes each, there's no way an ASR9k or a 7600 won't handle that.

I once had a vendor pitch me the idea of having a few different VRFs:

Internet (Customers + Peers)
Customers (Customer routes, peer interfaces would be in this VRF to avoid abuse)
Whatever else one wanted to do…

The problems become more complex as you have this explosion happen when someone else wants to do another hybrid solution.  Watch your TCAM (7600 you mentioned above) start to disappear quickly, combined with whatever complexities you dare add with dual-stack.

These days when talking to vendors and carriers, I do suggest asking about IPv6 first.  And call your IPv4 VRF "Internet-Classic"©(™)®*

- Jared