Skip to main content

Using BGP for routing in large-scale data centers
draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc-03

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Replaced".
Authors Petr Lapukhov , Ariff Premji
Last updated 2013-02-10
Replaced by draft-ietf-rtgwg-bgp-routing-large-dc, RFC 7938
RFC stream (None)
Formats
Additional resources
Stream Stream state (No stream defined)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
RFC Editor Note (None)
IESG IESG state I-D Exists
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD (None)
Send notices to (None)
draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc-03
IDR                                                          P. Lapukhov
Internet-Draft                                           Microsoft Corp.
Intended status: Informational                                 A. Premji
Expires: August 14, 2013                                 Arista Networks
                                                       February 10, 2013

           Using BGP for routing in large-scale data centers
                 draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc-03

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 August 14, 2013.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2013 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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 1]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 2]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 3]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 4]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 5]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 6]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 7]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 8]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013                [Page 9]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 10]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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  Link-state IGPs and unnecessary N-way routes.  Consider a design
      where a link-state IGP is used between highly connected spine and
      leaf nodes, where each spine node is expected to form adjacencies
      with every leaf node.  In such a topology it may be quite common
      for routes to be learned indirectly during IGP state changes and
      when links fail.  Such state introduces unwanted and unnecessary
      N-way ECMP routes.  While features such as "maximum-paths" can be
      implemented to address this issue in an IGP design, a BGP only
      design avoids this situation altogether.
   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).

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 11]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

                                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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 12]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

   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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 13]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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
      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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 14]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 15]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

               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
   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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 16]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

   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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 17]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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
      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

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 18]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   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.

   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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 19]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

   [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.

   [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.

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 20]
Internet-Draft     draft-lapukhov-bgp-routing-large-dc     February 2013

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/

Lapukhov & Premji        Expires August 14, 2013               [Page 21]