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Direct Peering Session

A direct peering session is a BGP session which is usually established over a dedicated link. They can be tied to BGP groups in order to group them logically. Generally, such sessions are made at network exit points with neighboring hosts outside the AS. They are configured on routers which may or may not be dedicated to routing Internet traffic.

In Peering Manager

Inside Peering Manager, you create direct peering sessions to model BGP sessions established with remote peers and that are not using Internet exchange LANs. For each direct peering session that you create, the following properties can be configured (n.b. some are optional):

  • Service Reference: Optional internal service reference that can be used as a unique field to identify a session.
  • Local Autonomous System: autonomous system owning the session.
  • Local IP Address: local IPv6 or IPv4 address to be bounded on a local router.
  • Autonomous System: autonomous system number of the remote peer.
  • BGP Group: group to which the BGP session belongs to.
  • Relationship: the relationship with the remote peer such as customer, transit provider or private peer.
  • IP Address: IPv6 or IPv4 address of the remote peer.
  • Password: MD5 password to secure the BGP session ; it can be a clear text password or an encrypted one. In the latter case, make sure that the router will not try to encrypt the password again.
  • Multihop TTL: value to set the time to live interval for IP packets used for the BGP control traffic. It defaults to 1 for external BGP sessions but can be set to a higher value to establish sessions that have to cross a network composed of more than one router in the transit path of the packets.
  • Status: session's status such as enabled, disabled, etc.
  • Router: the router on which the BGP session should be configured.
  • Import Routing Policies: a list of routing policies to apply when receiving prefixes.
  • Export Routing Policies: a list of routing policies to apply when advertising prefixes.
  • BFD: an optional BFD configuration to check BGP session liveness.
  • Comments: text to explain the purposes of the BGP sessions. Can use Markdown formatting.
  • Tags: a list of tags to help identifying and searching for a BGP session.