BGP in the Data Center

Chapter 5. BGP Life Cycle Management

So far, this book has laid the groundwork to create a simple, automatable configuration for a data center network using BGP. But we have just gone through the initial configuration of a leaf or spine router. As any network operator knows, the job is far from done after the network is deployed. Routers need to be upgraded, security patches need to be applied, new routers need to be rolled in, and heaven help us all, what if BGP refuses to behave? This chapter addresses these questions.

Useful show Commands

So far, we’ve only discussed configuring BGP, without viewing the fruits of our labor. This section covers two of the most useful and common commands used to view BGP’s status. This section is intended to help network operators new to BGP get off the ground (though some old masters might learn a thing or two that’s new, as well), and to highlight differences from the traditional operation, not be a complete reference. There are lots of online and printed documentation on the various show commands used in BGP.

Displaying BGP Session Information

The most popular command to see BGP’s status is show ip bgp summary. Figure 5-1 shows sample output for the command for the reference topology in this book (based on FRRouting).

Figure 5-1. Showing the network

This command shows only the output of IPv4 BGP sessions. When BGP began life, there was ...