• Customer edge (CE) devices provide customers access to the service-provider network over a data link to one or more provider edge routers. The CE device advertises the site’s local routes to the router and learns the remote VPN routes from it. A switch can be a CE. • Provider edge (PE) routers exchange routing information with CE devices by using static routing or a routing protocol such as BGP, RIPv2, OSPF, or EIGRP. The PE is only required to maintain VPN routes for those VPNs to which it is directly attached, eliminating the need for the PE to maintain all of the service-provider VPN routes. Each PE router maintains a VRF for each of its directly connected sites.
Multiple interfaces on a PE router can be associated with a single VRF if all of these sites participate in the same VPN. Each VPN is mapped to a specified VRF. After learning local VPN routes from CEs, a PE router exchanges VPN routing information with other PE routers by using internal BGP (IBPG). • Provider routers or core routers are any routers in the service provider network that do not attach to CE devices. With multi-VRF CE, multiple customers can share one CE, and only one physical link is used between the CE and the PE. The shared CE maintains separate VRF tables for each customer and switches or routes packets for each customer based on its own routing table.
Multi-VRF CE extends limited PE functionality to a CE device, giving it the ability to maintain separate VRF tables to extend the privacy and security of a VPN to the branch office. Network Topology The figure shows a configuration using switches as multiple virtual CEs. This scenario is suited for customers who have low bandwidth requirements for their VPN service, for example, small companies. In this case, multi-VRF CE support is required in the switches. Because multi-VRF CE is a Layer 3 feature, each interface in a VRF must be a Layer 3 interface. Figure 1:
Switches Acting as Multiple Virtual CEs When the CE switch receives a command to add a Layer 3 interface to a VRF, it sets up the appropriate mapping between the VLAN ID and the policy label (PL) in multi-VRF-CE-related data structures and adds the VLAN ID and PL to the VLAN database. When multi-VRF CE is configured, the Layer 3 forwarding table is conceptually partitioned into two sections: • The multi-VRF CE routing section contains the routes from different VPNs. • The global routing section contains routes to non-VPN networks, such as the Internet. Configuring Multi-VRF CE Network Topology Configuring Multi-VRF CE 2