Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 User Guide Release 10.5.0

Multiprotocol BGP

Multiprotocol BGP (MBGP) is an extension to BGP that supports multiple address families—IPv4 and IPv6. MBGP carries multiple sets of unicast and multicast routes depending on the address family.

You can enable the MBGP feature on a per router, per template, and/or a per peer basis. The default is the IPv4 unicast routes.

BGP session supports multiple address family interface (AFI) and sub address family interface (SAFI) combinations, BGP uses OPEN message to convey this information to the peers. As a result, the IPv6 routing information is exchanged over the IPv4 peers and vice versa.

BGP routers that support IPv6 can set up BGP sessions using IPv6 peers. If the existing BGP-v4 session is capable of exchanging ipv6 prefixes, the same is used to carry ipv4 as well as ipv6 prefixes. If the BGP-v4 neighbor goes down, it also impacts the IPv6 route exchange. If BGP-v6 session exists, it continues to operate independently from BGP-v4.

Multiprotocol BGPv6 supports many of the same features and functionality as BGPv4. IPv6 enhancements to MBGP include support for an IPv6 address family and Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) and next hop attributes that use the IPv6 addresses.