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Community, Route reflector – H3C Technologies H3C S7500E Series Switches User Manual

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If an option is configured for both a peer and its peer group, the last configuration takes effect.

Community

A peer group makes peers in it enjoy the same policy, while a community makes a group of BGP

routers in several ASs enjoy the same policy. Community is a path attribute and advertised between

BGP peers, without being limited by AS.

A BGP router can modify the community attribute for a route before sending it to other peers.

Besides using well-known community attributes, you can define extended community attributes by

using a community list to define a routing policy.

Route reflector

iBGP peers should be fully meshed to maintain connectivity. If there are n routers in an AS, the number

of iBGP connections is n (n-1)/2, and therefore large amounts of network and CPU resources will be

consumed.

Using route reflectors can solve this issue. In an AS, a router acts as a route reflector, and other

routers act as clients connecting to the route reflector. The route reflector forwards routing information

between clients, and thus BGP sessions between clients need not be established.

A router that is neither a route reflector nor a client is a non-client, which has to establish BGP sessions

to the route reflector and other non-clients, as shown below.

Figure 6-13 Network diagram for route reflector

The route reflector and clients form a cluster. In some cases, you can configure more than one route

reflector in a cluster to improve network reliability and prevent single point failure, as shown in the

following figure. The configured route reflectors must have the same Cluster_ID to avoid routing loops.