Configuring 6PE Route Reflector on Cisco IOS
Imagine you want to deploy a BGP route reflector for MPLS 6PE or L3VPN service. Both services run over MPLS LSPs, use IPv4 BGP sessions, and use IPv4 next hops for BGP routes. There’s absolutely no reason to need IPv6 routing on a node that handles solely the control-plane activity (it never appears as a BGP next hop anywhere), right? Cisco IOS disagrees, as I discovered when running route reflector integration tests for netlab 6PE and (MPLS) L3VPN functionality.
Most platforms failed those tests because we forgot to configure route-reflector-clients in labeled IPv6 and VPNv4/VPNv6 address families1. That was easy to fix, but the IOS-based devices were still failing the tests, with nothing in the toolchain ever complaining about configuration problems.
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