[c-nsp] PBR or VRF

[james edwards]

I have a customer who has locations throughout the state. Their requirements 
for internet access a not great, the major requirement is each office has 
good connections (low latency/jitter) to the other offices. They have a VoIP 
and POTS PBX, VoIP is only for office to office, all other calls are on the 
POTS card on the PBX. They also have a central database that the business 
lives and dies on. New Mexico has 14 phone companies so the VoIP allows then 
to save big bucks, xLEC to xLEC calls can be as much a 50 cents/min.

Sales came up with a solution and now I have to implement it. There is a 
main office and outlying offices, each has a T-1 (integrated voice and data) 
into our cloud (CBX-500 network) and as luck would have it this all comes 
together on one router. It looks like a hub and spoke network with the hub 
being this router. The main office also has DSL with us; to save some $$ all 
the outlying offices will send internet bound traffic to the main office on 
the DSL, which defaults back to us. Any on net traffic (traffic bound to 
addresses on our network) will take the normal route across our network.

My first thought was PBR to force the outlying offices internet bound 
traffic down the DSL link. I was wondering if VRF would be another way to 
make this work. In reading it seems so but much of the docs on VRF are in 
the context of VPN's or MPLS. If VRF would work is there an 
advantage/disadvantage to VRF over PBR. The hub router where the PBR or VRF 
happens is a 7206 NPE-400.

James
Routing and Security Administrator
At the Santa Fe Office: Cyber Mesa Telecom
jamesh at cybermesa.com  noc at cybermesa.com
http://www.cybermesa.com/ContactCM