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draft-ietf-rtgwg-bgp-routing-large-dc
IDR P. Lapukhov
Internet-Draft Microsoft Corp.
Intended status: Informational A. Premji
Expires: February 11, 2013 Arista Networks
August 10, 2012
Using BGP for routing in large-scale data centers
draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc-02
Abstract
Some service providers build and operate data centers that support
over 100,000 servers. In this document, such data centers are
referred to as "large-scale" to differentiate them the from more
common smaller infrastructures. The environments of this scale have
a unique set of network requirements, with emphasis on operational
simplicity and network stability.
This document summarizes ideas and experience of many people involved
in designing and operating large scale data centers using BGP as the
only control-plane protocol. The intent here is to report a proven
and stable routing design that could be leveraged by others in the
industry.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on February 11, 2013.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Document structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Traditional data center designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Layer 2 Designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Fully routed network designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Network design requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.1. Traffic patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.2. CAPEX minimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3. OPEX minimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.4. Traffic Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Requirement List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Network topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.1. Clos topology overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.2. Clos topology properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.3. Scaling Clos topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Routing design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.1. Choosing the routing protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.2. BGP configuration for Clos topology . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.2.1. BGP Autonomous System numbering layout . . . . . . . . 11
7.2.2. Non-unique private BGP ASN's . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7.2.3. Prefix advertisement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7.2.4. External connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7.2.5. Route aggregation at the network edge . . . . . . . . 14
7.3. ECMP Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.3.1. Basic ECMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.3.2. BGP ECMP over multiple ASN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7.4. BGP convergence properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7.4.1. Convergence timing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7.4.2. Failure impact scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7.5. Third-party route injection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
10. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
11. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
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1. Introduction
This document describes a practical routing design that can be used
in large-scale data centers. Such data centers, also known as hyper-
scale or warehouse-scale data centers, have a unique attribute of
supporting over a 100,000 end hosts. In order to accommodate
networks of such scale, operators are revisiting networking designs
and platforms to address this need.
This design described in this document is based upon the operational
experience with data centers built to support online applications,
such as Web search engines. The primary requirement in such
environments is operational simplicity and network stability, in
order to allow for a small group of people to support large network
infrastructure.
After experimentation and extensive testing, the final design
decision was made to use fully routed option with BGP as the control-
plane protocol. This is in contrast with more traditional data
center designs, which rely heavily on extending Layer 2 domains
across multiple network devices. This document elaborates the
network design requirements that led to this choice and presents
detailed aspects of the BGP routing design.
2. Document structure
The remaining of this document is organized as following. First, the
document gives a quick overview of the more traditional data center
network designs, and analyzes reasons that often made designers
ignore using BGP for data center routing in the past. Next, the
design requirements for large scale data centers are presented and
briefly discussed. Following this, the document gives an overview of
Clos network topology and its properties. After that, the arguments
for selecting BGP as the routing protocol for data center are
presented. Finally, the document discusses the design in more
details and covers specific BGP features use for the network
configuration.
3. Traditional data center designs
This section provides an overview of two types of traditional data
center designs - Layer 2 and fully routed Layer 3 topologies.
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3.1. Layer 2 Designs
In the networking industry, a common design choice for data centers
is to use a mix of Ethernet-based Layer 2 technologies. Network
topologies typically look like a tree with redundant uplinks and
three levels of hierarchy commonly named Core , Aggregation and
Access layers (see Figure 1). To accommodate bandwidth demands,
every next level has higher port density and bandwidth capacity,
moving upwards in the topology. To keep terminology uniform, in this
document these topology layers will be referred to as "tiers", e.g.
Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 instead of Core, Aggregation or Access
layers.
+------+ +------+
| | | |
| |--| | Tier1
| | | |
+------+ +------+
| | | |
+---------+ | | +----------+
| +-------+--+------+--+-------+ |
| | | | | | | |
+----+ +----+ +----+ +----+
| | | | | | | |
| |-----| | | |-----| | Tier2
| | | | | | | |
+----+ +----+ +----+ +----+
| | | |
| | | |
| +-----+ | | +-----+ |
+-| |-+ +-| |-+ Tier3
+-----+ +-----+
| | | | | |
[Servers] [Servers]
Figure 1: Typical Data Center network layout
IP routing is normally used only at the upper layers in the topology,
e.g. Tier 1 or Tier 2. Some of the reasons for introducing such
large (sometimes called stretched) Layer 2 domains are:
o Supporting legacy applications that may require direct Layer 2
adjacency or use non-IP protocols
o Seamless mobility for virtual machines, to allow the preservation
of IP addresses when a virtual machine moves across physical hosts
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o Simplified IP addressing - less IP subnets is required for the
data center
o Application load-balancing may require direct Layer 2 reachability
to perform certain functions such as Layer 2 Direct Server Return
(DSR)
3.2. Fully routed network designs
Network designs that leverage IP routing down to the access layer
(Tier 3) of the network have gained popularity as well. The main
benefit of such designs is improved network stability and
scalability, as a result of confining L2 broadcast domains. A common
choice of routing protocol for data center designs would be an IGP,
such as OSPF or ISIS. As data centers grow in scale, and server
count exceeds tens of thousands, such fully routed designs become
more attractive.
Although BGP is the de-facto standard protocol for routing on the
Internet, having wide support from both the vendor and service
provider communities, it is not generally deployed in data centers
for a number of reasons:
o BGP is perceived as a "WAN only protocol only" and not often
considered for enterprise or data center applications.
o BGP is believed to have a "much slower" routing convergence than
traditional IGPs.
o BGP deployment within an Autonomous System (iBGP mesh) is assumed
to have a dependency on the presence of an IGP, which assists with
recursive next-hop resolution.
o BGP is perceived to require significant configuration overhead and
does not support any form of neighbor auto-discovery.
In this document we demonstrate a practical approach for using BGP as
the single routing protocol for data center networks.
4. Network design requirements
This section describes and summarizes network design requirement for
a large-scale data center.
4.1. Traffic patterns
The primary requirement when building an interconnection network for
large number of servers is to accommodate application bandwidth and
latency requirements. Until recently it was quite common to see
traffic flows mostly entering and leaving the data center (also known
as north-south traffic) There were no intense highly meshed flows or
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traffic patterns between the machines within the data center. As a
result, traditional "tree" topologies were sufficient to accommodate
such flows, even with high oversubscription ratios in network
equipment. If more bandwidth was required, it was added by "scaling
up" the network elements, e.g. by upgrading the switch line-cards or
fabrics.
In contrast, large-scale data centers often host applications that
generate significant amount of server to server traffic, also known
as "east-west" traffic. Examples of such applications could be
compute clusters such as Hadoop or live virtual machine migrations.
Scaling up traditional tree topologies to match these bandwidth
demands becomes either too expensive or impossible due to physical
limitations.
4.2. CAPEX minimization
The cost of the network infrastructure alone (CAPEX) constitutes
about 10-15% of total data center expenditure (see [GREENBERG2009]).
However, the absolute cost is significant, and there is a need to
constantly drive down the cost of networking elements themselves.
This can be accomplished in two ways:
o Unifying all network elements, preferably using the same hardware
type or even the same device. This allows for bulk purchases with
discounted pricing.
o Driving costs down using economic principles, by introducing
multiple network equipment vendors.
In order to allow for vendor diversity, it is important to minimize
the software feature requirements for the network elements.
Furthermore, this strategy provides maximum flexibility of vendor
equipment choices while enforcing interoperability using open
standards
4.3. OPEX minimization
Operating large scale infrastructure could be expensive, provided
that larger amount of elements will statistically fail more often.
Having a simpler design and operating using a limited software
feature-set ensures that failures will mostly result from hardware
malfunction and not software issues.
An important aspect of OPEX minimization is reducing size of failure
domains in the network. Ethernet networks are known to be
susceptible to broadcast or unicast traffic storms that have dramatic
impact on network performance and availability. The use of a fully
routed design significantly reduces the size of the data-plane
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failure domains (e.g. limits them to Tier-3 switches only). However,
such designs also introduce the problem of distributed control-plane
failures. This observation calls for simpler control-plane protocols
that are expected to have less chances of network meltdown.
4.4. Traffic Engineering
In any data center, application load-balancing is a critical function
performed by network devices. Traditionally, load-balancers are
deployed as dedicated devices in the traffic forwarding path. The
problem arises in scaling load-balancers under growing traffic
demand. A preferable solution would be able to scale load-balancing
layer horizontally, by adding more of the uniform nodes and
distributing incoming traffic across these nodes
In situation like this, an ideal choice would be to use network
infrastructure itself to distribute traffic across a group of load-
balancers. A combination of features such as Anycast prefix
advertisement [RFC4786] along with Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP)
functionality could be used to accomplish this goal. To allow for
more granular load-distribution, it is beneficial for the network to
support the ability to perform controlled per-hop traffic
engineering. For example, it is beneficial to directly control the
ECMP next-hop set for Anycast prefixes at every level of network
hierarchy.
5. Requirement List
This section summarizes the list of requirements, based on the
discussion so far:
o REQ1: Select a network topology where capacity could be scaled
"horizontally" by adding more links and network switches of the
same type, without requiring an upgrade to the network elements
themselves.
o REQ2: Define a narrow set of software features/protocols supported
by a multitude of networking equipment vendors.
o REQ3: Among the network protocols, choose the one that has a
simpler implementation in terms of minimal programming code
complexity.
o REQ4: The network routing protocol should allow for explicit
control of the routing prefix next-hop set using built-in protocol
mechanics.
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6. Network topology
This section outlines the most common choice for horizontally
scalable topology in large scale data centers.
6.1. Clos topology overview
A common choice for a horizontally scalable topology is a folded Clos
topology, sometimes called "fat-tree" (see, for example, [INTERCON]
and [ALFARES2008]). This topology features odd number of stages
(sometimes known as dimensions) and is commonly made of the same
uniform elements, e.g. switches with the same port count. Therefore,
the choice of Clos topology satisfies both REQ1 and REQ2. See
Figure 2 below for an example of a folded 3-stage Clos topology:
+-------+
| |----------------------------+
| |------------------+ |
| |--------+ | |
+-------+ | | |
+-------+ | | |
| |--------+---------+-------+ |
| |--------+-------+ | | |
| |------+ | | | | |
+-------+ | | | | | |
+-------+ | | | | | |
| |------+-+-------+-+-----+ | |
| |------+-+-----+ | | | | |
| |----+ | | | | | | | |
+-------+ | | | | | | ---------> M links
Tier1 | | | | | | | | |
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+
| | | | | |
| | | | | | Tier2
| | | | | |
+-------+ +-------+ +-------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | ---------> N Links
| | | | | | | | |
O O O O O O O O O Servers
Figure 2: 3-Stage Folded Clos topology
In the networking industry, a topology like this is sometimes
referred to as "Leaf and Spine" network, where "Spine" is the name
given to the middle stage of the Clos topology (Tier 1) and "Leaf" is
the name of input/output stage (Tier 2). However, for uniformity, we
will continue to refer to these layers using the "Tier n" notation.
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6.2. Clos topology properties
The following are some key properties of the Clos topology:
o Topology is fully non-blocking (or more accurately - non-
interfering) if M >= N and oversubscribed by a factor of N/M
otherwise. Here M and N is the uplink and downlink port count
respectively, for Tier 2 switch, as shown on Figure 2
o Implementing Clos topology requires a routing protocol supporting
ECMP with the fan-out of M or more
o Every Tier 1 device has exactly one path to every end host
(server) in this topology
o Traffic flowing from server to server is naturally load-balanced
over all available paths using simple ECMP behavior
6.3. Scaling Clos topology
A Clos topology could be scaled either by increasing network switch
port count or adding more stages, e.g. moving to a 5-stage Clos, as
illustrated on Figure 3 below:
Tier1
+-----+
| |
+--| |--+
| +-----+ |
Tier2 | | Tier2
+-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+
+-------------| DEV |--+--| |--+--| |-------------+
| +-----| C |--+ | | +--| |-----+ |
| | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ | |
| | | |
| | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ | |
| +-----+-----| DEV |--+ | | +--| |-----+-----+ |
| | | +---| D |--+--| |--+--| |---+ | | |
| | | | +-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+ | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+ +-----+
| DEV | | DEV | +--| |--+ | | | |
| A | | B | Tier3 | | Tier3 | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
| | | | | | | |
O O O O <- Servers -> O O O O
Figure 3: 5-Stage Clos topology
The topology on Figure 3 is built from switches with port count of 4
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and provides full bisection bandwidth to all connected servers. We
will refer to the collection of directly connected Tier 2 and Tier 3
switches as a "cluster" in this document. For example, devices A, B,
C, and D on Figure 3 form a cluster.
In practice, the Tier 3 level of the network (typically top of rack
switches, or ToRs) is where oversubscription is introduced to allow
for packaging of more servers in data center. The main reason to
limit oversubscription at a single layer of the network is to
simplify application development that would otherwise need to account
for two bandwidth pools: within the same access switch (e.g. rack)
and outside of the local switch Since oversubscription itself does
not have any effect on the routing design, we will not be discussing
it further in this document
7. Routing design
This section discusses the motivation for choosing BGP as the routing
protocol and BGP configuration for routing in Clos topology.
7.1. Choosing the routing protocol
The set of requirements discussed earlier call for a single routing
protocol (REQ2) to reduce complexity and interdependencies. While it
is common to rely on an IGP in this situation, the document proposes
the use of BGP only. The advantages of using BGP are discussed
below.
o BGP inherently has less complexity within its protocol design -
internal data structures and state-machines are simpler when
compared to a link-state IGP, such as OSPF. For example, instead
of implementing adjacency formation, adjacency maintenance and/or
flow-control, BGP simply relies on TCP as the underlying
transport. This fulfills REQ1 and REQ2.
o BGP information flooding overhead is less when compared to link-
state IGPs. Indeed, since every BGP router typically re-
calculates and propagates best-paths only, a network failure is
masked as soon as the BGP speaker finds an alternate path, which
often exists in highly symmetric topologies, such as Clos. In
contrary, the event propagation scope of a link-state IGP is
single flooding domain, regardless of the failure type.
Furthermore, even though this does not cause any significant
impact on the modern routers, it is worth mentioning that all
well-known link-state IGPs feature periodic refresh updates, while
BGP does not expire routing state.
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o BGP supports third-party (recursively resolved) next-hops. This
allows for ECMP or forwarding based on application-defined
forwarding paths, by establishing an eBGP multihop peering session
with the application "controller". This satisfied REQ4 stated
above. Some IGPs, such as OSPF, support similar functionality
using concepts such as "Forwarding Address", but do not satisfy
other requirement, such as protocol simplicity.
o Plain BGP configuration, without routing policies, is easier to
troubleshoot for network reachability issues. For example, it is
straightforward to dump contents of BGP Loc-RIB and compare it to
the router's RIB and, possibly, FIB. Furthermore, every BGP
neighbor has corresponding Adj-RIB-In and Adj-RIB-Out structures
with incoming/outgoing NRLI information that could be easily
correlated on both sides of the BGP peering session. Thus, BGP
fully satisfies REQ3.
7.2. BGP configuration for Clos topology
Clos topologies that have more than 5 stages are very uncommon due to
the large numbers of interconnects required by such a design.
Therefore, the examples below are made with regards to the 5 stage
Clos topology (unfolded).
7.2.1. BGP Autonomous System numbering layout
The diagram below illustrates suggests BGP Autonomous System Number
(BGP ASN) allocation scheme. The following is a list of guidelines
that can be used:
o All BGP peering sessions are external BGP (eBGP) established over
direct point-to-point links interconnecting the network nodes.
o 16-bit (two octet) BGP ASNs are used, since these are widely
supported and have better vendor interoperability (e.g. no need to
support BGP capability negotiation).
o Private BGP ASNs from the range 64512-64534 are used so as to
avoid ASN conflicts. The private ASN stripping feature can be
leveraged as a result (see below).
o A single BGP ASN is allocated to the Clos topology's middle stage
("Tier 1"), e.g. ASN 64534 as shown in Figure 4
o Unique BGP ASN is allocated per each group of "Tier 2" switches
(e.g. aggregation switches).
o Unique BGP ASN is allocated to every Tier 3 switch (e.g. ToR) in
this topology.
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ASN 64534
+---------+
| +-----+ |
| | | |
+-|-| |-|-+
| | +-----+ | |
ASN 64XXX | | | | ASN 64XXX
+---------+ | | | | +---------+
| +-----+ | | | +-----+ | | | +-----+ |
+-----------|-| |-|-+-|-| |-|-+-|-| |-|-----------+
| +---|-| |-|-+ | | | | +-|-| |-|---+ |
| | | +-----+ | | +-----+ | | +-----+ | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | +-----+ | | +-----+ | | +-----+ | | |
| +-----+---|-| |-|-+ | | | | +-|-| |-|---+-----+ |
| | | +-|-| |-|-+-|-| |-|-+-|-| |-|-+ | | |
| | | | | +-----+ | | | +-----+ | | | +-----+ | | | | |
| | | | +---------+ | | | | +---------+ | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ | | +-----+ | | +-----+ +-----+
| ASN | | | +-|-| |-|-+ | | | |
|65YYY| | ... | | | | | | ... | | ... |
+-----+ +-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+ +-----+
| | | | +---------+ | | | |
O O O O <- Servers -> O O O O
Figure 4: BGP ASN layout for 5-stage Clos
7.2.2. Non-unique private BGP ASN's
The use of private BGP ASNs limits to the usable range of 1022 unique
numbers. Since it is very likely that the number of network switches
could exceed this number, a workaround is required. One approach
would be to re-use the private ASN's assigned to the Tier 3 switches
across different clusters. For example, private BGP ASN's 65001,
65002 ... 65032 could be used within every individual cluster and
assigned to Tier 3 switches.
To avoid route suppression due to AS PATH loop detection mechanism in
BGP, upstream eBGP sessions on Tier 3 switches must be configured
with the "AllowAS In" feature that allows accepting a device's own
ASN in received route advertisements. Introducing this feature does
not create the opportunity for routing loops under misconfiguration
since the AS PATH is always incremented when routes are propagated
between topology tiers.
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Another solution to this problem would be to using four-octet (32-
bit) BGP ASNs. However, there are no reserved private ASN range in
the four-octet numbering scheme although efforts are underway to
support this, see [I-D.mitchell-idr-as-private-reservation]. This
will also require vendors to implement specific policy features, such
as four-octet private AS removal from AS-PATH attribute.
7.2.3. Prefix advertisement
A Clos topology features a large number of point-to-point links and
associated prefixes. Advertising all of these routes into BGP may
create FIB overload conditions in the network devices. There are two
possible solutions that can help prevent such FIB overload:
o Do not advertise any of the point-to-point links into BGP. Since
eBGP peering changes the next-hop address anyways at every node,
distant networks will automatically be reachable via the
advertising eBGP peer
o Advertising point-to-point links, but summarizing them on every
advertising device. This requires proper address allocation, for
example allocating a consecutive block of IP addresses per Tier 1
and Tier 2 device to be used for point-to-point interface
addressing.
Server facing subnets on Tier 3 switches must be announced into BGP
without using summarization on Tier 2 and Tier 1 switches.
Summarizing subnets in a Clos topology will result in route black-
holing under a single link failure (e.g. between Tier 2 and Tier 3
switch) and hence must be avoided. The use of peer links within the
same tier to resolve the black-holing problem by providing "bypass
paths" is undesirable due to O(N^2) complexity of the peering mesh
and waste of ports on the switches.
7.2.4. External connectivity
A dedicated cluster (or clusters) in the Clos topology could be used
for the purpose of connecting to the Wide Area Network (WAN) edge
devices, or WAN Routers. Tier-3 switches in such a cluster would be
replaced with WAN Routers, and eBGP peering would be used again,
though WAN routers are likely to belong to a public ASN.
The Tier 2 devices in such a dedicated cluster will be referred to as
"Border Routers" in this document. These devices have to perform a
few special functions:
o Hide network topology information when advertising paths to WAN
routers, i.e. remove private BGP ASNs from the AS-PATH attribute.
This is typically done to avoid BGP ASN number collisions between
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different data centers. A BGP policy feature called "Remove
Private AS" is commonly used to accomplish this. This feature
strips a contiguous sequence of private ASNs found in AS-PATH
attribute prior to advertising the path to a neighbor. This
assumes that all BGP ASN's used for intra data center numbering
are from the private ASN range.
o Originate a default route to the data center devices. This is the
only place where default route could be originated, as route
summarization is highly undesirable for the "scale-out" topology.
Alternatively, Border Routers may simply relay the default route
learned from WAN routers.
7.2.5. Route aggregation at the network edge
It is often desirable to aggregate network reachability information,
prior to advertising it to the WAN network. The reason being high
amount of IP prefixes originated from within the data center with
fully routed network design. For example, a network with 2000 Tier-3
switches will have 2000 servers subnets advertised into BGP.
However, as discussed before, the proposed network design does not
allow for route aggregation due to the lack of peer links inside
every tier.
It is possible to lift this restriction for the Border Routers, by
devising a different connectivity model for these devices. There are
two options possible:
o Interconnect the Border Routers using a full-mesh of physical
links or by using additional aggregation switches, forming star
topology. Build full-mesh of iBGP sessions between all Border
Routers to allow for sharing of specific network prefixes. Notice
that in this case the interconnecting peer links need to be
appropriately sized depending on the amount of traffic that is
planned to be taken in case of a device or link failure underneath
the Border Routers.
o Tier-1 devices may have additional physical links running toward
the Border Routers (which are Tier-2 devices in essence).
Specifically, if a protection from a single node/link failure is
desired, each Tier-1 devices would have to connect to at least two
Border Routers. This puts additional requirements on the port
count for Tier-1 devices and Border Routers.
If any of the above option is implemented, it is possible to perform
router aggregation on the Border Routers toward the WAN network core,
without risking routing black-hole condition under a single element
failure. However, notice that both these options would result in
non-uniform topology, as additional links have to be provisioned on
some network devices.
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7.3. ECMP Considerations
This section covers the Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) functionality for
Clos topology and discusses a few special requirements.
7.3.1. Basic ECMP
ECMP is the fundamental load-sharing mechanism used by a Clos
topology. Effectively, every lower-tier switch will use all of its
directly attached upper-tier devices to load-share traffic destined
to the same IP prefix. Number of ECMP paths between any two Tier-3
switches in Clos topology equals to the number of the switches in the
middle stage (Tier 1). For example, Figure 5 illustrates the
topology where Tier 3 device A has four paths to reach servers X and
Y, via Tier 2 devices B and C and then Tier 1 devices 1, 2, 3, and 4
respectively.
Tier 1
+-----+
| DEV |
+->| 1 |--+
| +-----+ |
Tier 2 | | Tier 2
+-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+
+------------>| DEV |--+->| DEV |--+--| |-------------+
| +-----| B |--+ | 2 | +--| |-----+ |
| | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ | |
| | | |
| | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ | |
| +-----+---->| DEV |--+ | DEV | +--| |-----+-----+ |
| | | +---| C |--+->| 3 |--+--| |---+ | | |
| | | | +-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+ | | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ | +-----+ | +-----+ +-----+
| DEV | | | Tier 3 +->| DEV |--+ Tier 3 | | | |
| A | | | | 4 | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
| | | | | | | |
O O O O <- Servers -> X Y O O
Figure 5: ECMP fan-out tree from A to X and Y
The ECMP requirement implies that the BGP implementation must support
multi-path fan-out for up to the maximum number of devices directly
attached at any point in the topology in upstream or downstream
direction. Normally, this number does not exceed half of the ports
found on a switch in the topology. For example, an ECMP max-path of
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32 would be required when building a Clos network using 64-port
devices.
Most BGP implementations declare paths to be equal from ECMP
perspective if they match up to and including step (e) in Section
9.1.2.2 of [RFC4271]. In the proposed network design there is no
underlying IGP, so all IGP costs are automatically assumed to be zero
(or otherwise the same value across all paths). Loop prevention is
assumed to be handled by the BGP best-path selection process.
7.3.2. BGP ECMP over multiple ASN
For application load-balancing purposes we may want the same prefix
to be advertised from multiple Tier-3 switches. From the perspective
of other devices, such a prefix would have BGP paths with different
AS PATH attribute values, though having the same AS PATH attribute
lengths. Therefore, the BGP implementations must support load-
sharing over above-mentioned paths. This feature is sometimes known
as "AS PATH multipath relax" and effectively allows for ECMP to be
done across different neighboring ASNs.
7.4. BGP convergence properties
This section reviews routing convergence properties of BGP in the
proposed design. A case is made that sub-second convergence is
achievable provided that implementation supports fast BGP peering
session deactivation upon failure of an associated link.
7.4.1. Convergence timing
BGP typically relies on an IGP to route around link/node failures
inside an AS, and implements either a polling based or an event-
driven mechanism to obtain updates on IGP state changes. The
proposed routing design does not use an IGP, so the only mechanisms
that could be used for fault detection are BGP keep-alive process (or
any other type of keep-alive mechanism) and link-failure triggers.
Relying solely on BGP keep-alive packets may result in high
convergence delays, in the order of multiple seconds (commonly, the
minimum recommended BGP hold timer value is 3 seconds). However,
many BGP implementations can shut down local eBGP peering sessions in
response to the "link down" event for the outgoing interface used for
BGP peering. This feature is sometimes called as "fast fail-over".
Since the majority of the links in modern data centers are point-to-
point fiber connections, a physical interface failure if often
detected in milliseconds and subsequently triggers a BGP re-
convergence.
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Furthermore, popular link technologies, such as 10Gbps Ethernet, may
support a simple form of OAM for failure signaling such as
[FAULTSIG10GE], which makes failure detection more robust.
Alternatively, as opposed to relying on physical layer for fault
signaling, some platforms may support Bidirectional Forwarding
Detection (BFD) ([RFC5880]) to allow for sub-second failure detection
and fault signaling to the BGP process. This, however, presents
additional requirements to vendor software and possibly hardware, and
may contradict REQ1.
Finally, the impact of BGP Minimum Route Advertisement Interval
(MRAI) timer needs to be considered. It is common for BGP
implementations to space out consecutive BGP UPDATE messages by at
least MRAI seconds. Notice that BGP UPDATE messages carrying
withdrawn routes are not affected by this timer. However, MRAI timer
may present significant convergence delays if a BGP speaker "waits"
for the new path to be learned from peers and has no local backup
path information.
However, in a Clos topology each BGP speaker has either one path only
or N paths for the same prefix, where N is a significantly large
number, e.g. N=32. Therefore, if a path fails there is either no
backup at all, or the backup is readily available in BGP Loc-RIB. In
the first case, the BGP withdrawal announcement will propagate un-
delayed and trigger re-convergence on affected devices. In the
second case, only the local ECMP group needs to be changed.
7.4.2. Failure impact scope
A network is declared to converge in response to a failure once all
devices within the failure impact scope are notified of the event and
have re-calculated their RIB's and consequently FIB's. Larger
failure impact scope normally means slower convergence, since more
devices have to be notified, and additionally results in less stable
network. In this section we demonstrate that with regards to failure
impact scope, BGP has some advantages over link-state routing
protocols when implemented in a Clos topology.
BGP is inherently a distance-vector protocol, and as such some of
failures could be masked if the local node can immediately find a
backup path. The worst case is that ALL devices in data center
topology would have to either withdraw a prefix completely, or update
the ECMP groups in the FIB. However, many failures will not result
in such wide impact. There are two failure cases where impact scope
is reduced.
o Failure of a link between Tier-2 and Tier-1 devices. In this
case, Tier-2 device will simply have to update its ECMP group,
removing the failed link. There is no need to send new
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information to the downstream Tier-3 devices. The affected Tier-1
device will lose the only path available to reach a particular
cluster and will have to withdraw the affected prefixes. Such
prefix withdrawal process will only affect Tier-2 switches
directly connected to the affected Tier-1 device. In turn, the
Tier-2 devices receiving BGP UPDATE message withdrawing prefixes
will simply have to update their ECMP groups for affected
prefixes. The Tier-3 devices will not be involved in re-
convergence process.
o Failure of a Tier-1 device. In this case, all Tier-2 devices
directly attached to the failed device will have to update their
ECMP groups for all IP prefixes from non-local cluster. The
Tier-3 devices are once again not involved in the re-convergence
process.
Even though it may seem that in case of such failures multiple IP
prefixes will have to be reprogrammed in the FIB, it is worth noting
that ALL of these prefixes share single ECMP group on Tier-2 device.
Thus, in case of a hierarchical FIB only a single change has to be
made to the FIB.
Even though BGP offers some failure scope reduction, controlled
reduction of the fault domain using summarization is not possible
with the proposed design, since using this technique may create route
black-holing issues as mentioned previously. Thus, the worst
control-plane failure impact scope is the network as a whole, e.g. in
a case of a link failure between Tier-2 and Tier-3 switches.
However, the amount of affected prefixes in this case would be much
less, as compared to a failure in the upper layers of a Clos network
topology. Finally, it is worth pointing that the property of having
such large failure scope is not a result of choosing BGP, but rather
a result of using the "scale-out" Clos topology.
7.5. Third-party route injection
BGP allows for a third-party BGP speaker (not necessarily directly
attached to the network devices) to inject routes anywhere in the
network topology. This could be achieved by peering an external
speaker using an eBGP multi-hop session with some or even all devices
in the topology. Furthermore, BGP diverse path distribution
[I-D.ietf-grow-diverse-bgp-path-dist] could be used to inject
multiple next-hop for the same prefix to facilitate load-balancing,
or using the BGP Add-Path extension (see [I-D.walton-bgp-add-paths])
if supported by the implementation. Using such a technique would
make it possible to implement unequal-cost load-balancing across
multiple clusters in the data-center, by associating the same prefix
with next-hops mapped to different clusters.
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For example, a third-party BGP speaker may peer with Tier-3 and
Tier-1 switches, injecting the same prefix, but using a special set
of BGP next-hops for Tier-1 devices. Those next-hops are assumed to
resolve recursively via BGP, and could be, for example, IP addresses
on Tier-3 switches. The resulting forwarding table programming could
provide desired traffic proportion distribution among different
clusters.
8. Security Considerations
The design does not introduce any additional security concerns. For
control plane security, BGP peering sessions could be authenticated
using TCP MD5 signature extension header [RFC2385]. Furthermore, BGP
TTL security [I-D.gill-btsh] could be used to reduce the risk of
session spoofing and TCP SYN flooding attacks against the control
plane.
9. IANA Considerations
This document includes no request to IANA.
10. Acknowledgements
This publication summarizes work of many people who participated in
developing, testing and deploying the proposed network design. Their
names, in alphabetical order, are George Chen, Parantap Lahiri, Dave
Maltz, Edet Nkposong, Robert Toomey, and Lihua Yuan. Authors would
also like to thank Linda Dunbar, Susan Hares and Jon Mitchell for
reviewing the document and providing valuable feedback.
11. Informative References
[RFC4786] Abley, J. and K. Lindqvist, "Operation of Anycast
Services", BCP 126, RFC 4786, December 2006.
[RFC4271] Rekhter, Y., Li, T., and S. Hares, "A Border Gateway
Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271, January 2006.
[RFC2385] Heffernan, A., "Protection of BGP Sessions via the TCP MD5
Signature Option", RFC 2385, August 1998.
[RFC5880] Katz, D. and D. Ward, "Bidirectional Forwarding Detection
(BFD)", RFC 5880, June 2010.
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[I-D.ietf-grow-diverse-bgp-path-dist]
Raszuk, R., Fernando, R., Patel, K., McPherson, D., and K.
Kumaki, "Distribution of diverse BGP paths.",
draft-ietf-grow-diverse-bgp-path-dist-08 (work in
progress), July 2012.
[I-D.mitchell-idr-as-private-reservation]
Mitchell, J., "Autonomous System (AS) Reservation for
Private Use", draft-mitchell-idr-as-private-reservation-01
(work in progress), August 2012.
[I-D.gill-btsh]
Gill, V., Heasley, J., and D. Meyer, "The BGP TTL Security
Hack (BTSH)", draft-gill-btsh-02 (work in progress),
May 2003.
[I-D.walton-bgp-add-paths]
Walton, D., "Advertisement of Multiple Paths in BGP",
draft-walton-bgp-add-paths-06 (work in progress),
July 2008.
[GREENBERG2009]
Greenberg, A., Hamilton, J., and D. Maltz, "The Cost of a
Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks",
January 2009.
[FAULTSIG10GE]
Frazier, H. and S. Muller, "Remote Fault & Break Link
Proposal for 10-Gigabit Ethernet", September 2000.
[INTERCON]
Dally, W. and B. Towles, "Principles and Practices of
Interconnection Networks", ISBN 978-0122007514,
January 2004.
[ALFARES2008]
Al-Fares, M., Loukissas, A., and A. Vahdat, "A Scalable,
Commodity Data Center Network Architecture", August 2008.
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Authors' Addresses
Petr Lapukhov
Microsoft Corp.
One Microsfot Way
Redmond, WA 98052
US
Phone: +1 425 7032723 X 32723
Email: petrlapu@microsoft.com
URI: http://microsoft.com/
Ariff Premji
Arista Networks
5470 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
US
Phone: +1 408-547-5699
Email: ariff@aristanetworks.com
URI: http://aristanetworks.com/
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