A BGP based virtual service implies that the VIPs are advertised through BGP. All the peers for which the field advertise VIP is enabled, the corresponding VIPs are advertised.

You can select the VIPs to be advertised using labels. When configuring the VSVIP, you can define that all the peers with a specific label must have a specific VIP advertised. Each peer on the front end receives the VIP route advertisement only from the virtual services if the label matches that of the peer.

Consider the example where,

  • One SE is connected to three front end routers, FE-Router-1, FE-Router-2, FE-Router-3.

  • FE-Router-1, FE-Router-2, and FE-Router-3 have labels Peer1, Peer2, and Peer3 respectively.

  • There are three virtual services in the Global VRF, namely, VS1, VS2, and VS3.



  • VS1 (1.1.1.1) is configured with the label Peer1. This implies, that the virtual service will be advertised to Peer1.

  • Similarly, VS2 will be advertised to Peer2 and VS 3 to Peer3, as defined by the labels.

Whenever BGP is enabled for a virtual service, the VIP will be advertised to all the front end routers. However, in this case, the VIP will be advertised to the selected peer only.

To implement this, the labels list bgp_peer_labels is introduced in the VSVIP object configuration.

VsVip.bgp_peer_labels is a list of unique strings (with a maximum of 128 strings).

The length of each string can be a maximum of 128 characters. A label can consist of upper and lower case alphabets, numbers, underscores, and hyphens.

Note:

  • If the VSVIP does not have any label, it will be advertised to all BGP peers with advertise_vip set to True.

  • If the VSVIP has the bgp_peer_labels, the peer with the field advertise_vip is set to True and the label matching the bgp_peer_labels will receive VIP advertisement. However, if the BGP peer configuration either has no label or if the label does not match, the peer will not receive the VIP advertisement.