HA setup (v 1.4.5)

Jigar Mehta jgmehta at ncsu.edu
Tue Sep 15 15:08:00 CEST 2015


I have BIRD installed to test working with a custom forwarding plane. The
forwarding plane supports HA in the following way :

-  Syncs up routing tables
-  Provides millisecond failover (since routing tables are synced up)
- Shared MAC
- At any given time only one of the appliance is actively receiving and
processing packets.
- Both appliances have BIRD running (rte_notify sends route updates to
forwarding plane) and a small wrapper that processes forwarding table
routing updates (static routes , etc)

Problem :
At any point of time, the forwarding plane has correct set of routes on
both appliances but bird's routing tables are out of sync since only the
active appliance is processing packets (eg : OSPF LSA). So when we
failover, BIRD running on secondary appliance does not have any routes
until it learns them through route updates (since now secondary appliance
is processing the LSA's ). This can also result in stale routes in
forwarding plane.
How do we support failover condition in BIRD ? (both OSPF and BGP (multiple
instances))

I would highly appreciate some thoughts on this issue. I did think about
BFD but then currently (if I interpreted it correctly supports only a
single instance of OSPF or BGP). Graceful recovery is only implemented for
BGP so not completely usable.



-- 
Jigar Mehta
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