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BGP Route Distinguisher Vs Route Target

The document clarifies the difference between route distinguisher and route target in MPLS VPNs. The route distinguisher is used to create a unique VPNv4 address for each customer by prepending an 8 byte field to the customer's IPv4 address. In contrast, the route target is a BGP community attribute that tells PE routers which customer prefixes to import and export by tagging prefixes with a unique 64 bit value for each customer. While books sometimes show the values as the same, they serve distinct functions - route distinguisher for unique addressing and route target for import/export rules.

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Mohit Mittal
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267 views2 pages

BGP Route Distinguisher Vs Route Target

The document clarifies the difference between route distinguisher and route target in MPLS VPNs. The route distinguisher is used to create a unique VPNv4 address for each customer by prepending an 8 byte field to the customer's IPv4 address. In contrast, the route target is a BGP community attribute that tells PE routers which customer prefixes to import and export by tagging prefixes with a unique 64 bit value for each customer. While books sometimes show the values as the same, they serve distinct functions - route distinguisher for unique addressing and route target for import/export rules.

Uploaded by

Mohit Mittal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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BGP Route Distinguisher vs Route

Target
In this post I am going to clarify the difference between route distinguisher and route target
within the Cisco world of MPLS VPN’s. The main confusion comes from the fact that in
most Cisco Press books they always show the route distinguisher value and route target value
as the same.
They are not the same and are used for completely different things.
In simple terms the route distinguisher is used to create a unique 96 bit address called the
VPNv4 address.
This ensures that even if two customers are running the 10.0.0.0/8 address space their
addresses remain unique within the MPLS network.
The Route Target is a 64 bit BGP community used to tag prefixes. It tells the Remote PE
routers which prefix it can import.

Route Distinguisher
The route distinguisher has only one purpose, to make IPv4 prefixes globally unique. It is
used by the PE routers to identify which VPN a packet belongs to, e.g to enable a router to
distinguish between 10.0.0.1/8 for Customer A and 10.0.0.1/8 for Customer B. The route
distinguisher is made up of an 8 byte field prefixed to the customer IPv4 address, the
resulting 12 byte field makes a unique VPNv4 address.

R1(config)#ip vrf Customer_A

If we do rd ? you can see the options for configuring the RD as described above
R1(config-vrf)#rd ?
ASN:nn or IP-address:nn VPN Route Distinguisher

For the purpose of this description I will configure the RD value as 65355:10

R1(config-vrf)#rd 65355:10

To verify this value enter the command sh ip vrf


R1#sh ip vrf
Name Default RD Interfaces
Customer_A 65355:10
Route Target
The route target on the other hand is an 8 byte field which is a BGP extended Communities
Attribute and it defines which prefixes are exported and imported on the PE routers. So for
example consider Router R3 has 2 VRF’s configured on it “Customer_A” and “Customer_B”
so you would define under each vrf a unique route target value, these take the same format as
the route distinguisher, but for the purpose of this explanation we are going to use 1:1 for
Customer_A and 2:2 for Customer_B. On R3 we want to export and import the prefixes for
Customer A and B, however on router R1 we only want to import and export the prefixes for
Customer_A and on router R2 we only want to import and export the prefixes for
Customer_B

To conclude, the route distinguisher and route target values perform two completely separate
functions, and although in a lot of cisco books the values are the same (which they can be) it is
confusing to someone learning MPLS for the first time as they assume they do the same thing.
The route distinguisher makes a unique VPNv4 address across the MPLS network and the route target
defines which prefixes get imported and exported on the PE routers.

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