BGP Graceful Restart

Sat Apr 17 09:30:15 UTC 2021

On 4/16/21 16:11, Graham Johnston wrote:
> I do believe that I understand the intended purpose of BGP
> graceful-restart. With that said, I was watching a video of a talk
> given by someone respected in the industry the other day on the use of
> graceful-shutdown and at the beginning of the talk there was a quick
> disclaimer that his topic had nothing to do with graceful-restart
> along with some text on the slide that provided me a clear indication
> that he was not a fan of graceful-restart.
>
> Largely, I suspect that his point was that if you otherwise do the
> right things during maintenance that graceful-restart has the
> potential of being really problematic if things go wrong, and thus he
> was discouraging the use of it. Is there consensus as to whether
> graceful-restart has any place in a service provider network?

When the majority of the hardware we had had a single control plane, we 
used GR on those (and only inside our AS).

But as nearly 100% of all our BGP-speaking hardware now has dual control 
planes, we just go for the vendor's NSR implementation. We've found that 
to be a lot more reliable because it is locally significant, 
predictable, and generally works well as it has matured a great deal in 
the last decade.

Mark.