Redundant Routes, BGP with MPLS provider

Thu Aug 30 18:17:55 UTC 2012

Hello all,

I am an Network Operator working in an Enterprise environment with offices all over the country(mostly connected via MPLS).  We are currently working towards building a Disaster Recovery Site that will host some of our vendor routers and provide the capability to access these vendors from both our primary and backup data center locations.  The routes(as advertised by the vendor's routers) will be the same at both locations.  I would like to advertise the routes from multiple locations at the same time, rather than suppress the routes and advertise conditionally.

What is the best method to Instruct the provider's network to prefer the Primary Data Center routes over the DR site?  Keep in mind that I am only peering with the provider over BGP and I have no visibility to the underlying MPLS architecture or configuration.  Although if you have specific questions  about their architecture, I can work to get answers.

Discussing in house, we have gone over a few different options:

-Advertise specific routes from primary site and summary routes from the DR site.  Most specific will always be chosen.
-Prepend the routes from the DR site so that they will have a longer AS-path than the Primary location
-Use Community Strings to influence local preference.(Still working to find out if Provider will pass our community strings)

Just looking for some ideas and best practices.  Any thoughts or insight would be much welcomed and appreciated.  This is my first message on NANOG, so please be gentle.  I apologize in advance if I have done something incorrectly.

Wes

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