The VPN routing and forwarding (VRF) table is a highly critical component in L3VPNs. A VRF is created on a per VPN basis within each PE device and can support multiple sites per subscriber VPN. The VRF is the fundamental mechanism that enables the partitioning of individual customers over the shared IP routed infrastructure.

A VRF in an L3VPN can be configured to transport unicast traffic, multicast traffic, or both. MPLS Manager models (represents) a VRF that transports both unicast and multicast traffic as being part of a VPN and a multicast VPN.

VRF is described in “VRF (Layer 2)” on page 54. The description lists the key attributes for VRF, identifies the root-cause problems that are diagnosed for VRF, and identifies the events that are detected for VRF.