DELL 9.7(0.0) User Manual

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Establish a Session
Information exchange between peers is driven by events and timers. The focus in BGP is on the traffic 
routing policies.
In order to make decisions in its operations with other BGP peers, a BGP process uses a simple finite state 
machine that consists of six states: Idle, Connect, Active, OpenSent, OpenConfirm, and Established. For 
each peer-to-peer session, a BGP implementation tracks which of these six states the session is in. The 
BGP protocol defines the messages that each peer should exchange in order to change the session from 
one state to another.
State
Description
Idle
BGP initializes all resources, refuses all inbound BGP connection attempts, and 
initiates a TCP connection to the peer.
Connect
In this state the router waits for the TCP connection to complete, transitioning to 
the OpenSent state if successful.
If that transition is not successful, BGP resets the ConnectRetry timer and 
transitions to the Active state when the timer expires.
Active
The router resets the ConnectRetry timer to zero and returns to the Connect state.
OpenSent
After successful OpenSent transition, the router sends an Open message and waits 
for one in return.
OpenConfirm
After the Open message parameters are agreed between peers, the neighbor 
relation is established and is in the OpenConfirm state. This is when the router 
receives and checks for agreement on the parameters of open messages to 
establish a session.
Established
Keepalive messages are exchanged next, and after successful receipt, the router is 
placed in the Established state. Keepalive messages continue to be sent at regular 
periods (established by the Keepalive timer) to verify connections.
After the connection is established, the router can now send/receive Keepalive, Update, and Notification 
messages to/from its peer.
Peer Groups
Peer groups are neighbors grouped according to common routing policies. They enable easier system 
configuration and management by allowing groups of routers to share and inherit policies.
Peer groups also aid in convergence speed. When a BGP process needs to send the same information to 
a large number of peers, the BGP process needs to set up a long output queue to get that information to 
all the proper peers. If the peers are members of a peer group however, the information can be sent to 
one place and then passed onto the peers within the group.
Route Reflectors
Route reflectors reorganize the iBGP core into a hierarchy and allow some route advertisement rules.
NOTE: Do not use route reflectors (RRs) in the forwarding path. In iBGP, hierarchal RRs maintaining 
forwarding plane RRs could create routing loops.
Border Gateway Protocol IPv4 (BGPv4)
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