Cisco Cisco IOS Software Release 12.0(24)S

BGP must be configured in your network. 

The following restrictions apply to the BGP Configuration Using Peer Templates feature for this release:

A peer policy template can inherit up to seven policy templates, and no more than eight policy 
templates can be applied to a BGP neighbor or peer. 

A peer session template can directly inherit only one session template. However, each inherited 
session template can also inherit one session template. So, a BGP neighbor can directly inherit only 
one session template and indirectly inherit up to seven additional session templates. 

A BGP neighbor cannot be configured to work with both peer groups and peer templates. In other 
words, a BGP neighbor can be configured only to belong to a peer group or to inherit policies from 
peer templates. 

To configure this feature, you must understand the following concepts:

In previous versions of Cisco IOS software, BGP update messages were grouped based on peer group 
configurations. This method of grouping neighbors for BGP update message generation reduced the 
amount of system processing resources needed to scan the routing table. This method, however, had the 
following limitations: 

All neighbors that shared the same peer group configuration also had to share the same outbound 
routing policies.

All neighbors had to belong to the same peer group and address family. Neighbors configured in 
different address-families could not belong to different peer groups.

These limitations existed to balance optimal update generation and replication against peer group 
configuration. These limitations also caused the network operator to configure smaller peer groups, 
which reduced the efficiency of update message generation and limited the scalability of neighbor 
configuration.