Virtual Route Reflector (VRR)

You can implement route reflector capability using a general-purpose virtual machine on a 64-bit Intel-based blade server or appliance. Benefits are: 

• Improved scalability (depending on the server core hardware use) 
• Scalability of the BGP network with lower cost using VRR at multiple locations in the network 
• Fast and more flexible deployment using Intel servers rather than router hardware 
• Space savings through the elimination of router hardware 

Many of the applications running on Junos OS can be shifted to external and more robust, powerful computing resources, thereby preserving the hardware resources on devices running Junos OS for switching and routing functionalities. Among the protocols and modules that can be transferred to external computing utilities, control plane protocols are suited for such an offloading. Such a virtualized process can be run on more powerful blade servers, and the computed entities can be downloaded to the router or the switch. The scaling dimensions for each of the virtualized processes can be increased to a large level. 

Out of the various processes that run within rpd, route reflector is an operation that requires a considerable amount of computing power (both with memory utilization and computation overhead). Such a virtualized module can be run on external servers to achieve more scaling numbers. The virtualization of such functional blocks enables the service to be run on external high-performance servers. To enable this capability of a virtual route reflector, the entire Junos OS is virtualized and launched as a VM (virtual machine). To achieve higher and more effective scaling numbers, rpd is configured as a 64-bit application, which benefits from a much better address space. The 64-bit capacity of rpd requires the kernel to also be of 64-bit type. The purpose of route reflection is loop prevention when the internal BGP (IBGP) routing devices are not fully meshed. To accomplish this, RRs break one of the rules of normal BGP operation: They readvertise routes learned from an internal BGP peer to other internal BGP peers. A new Junos OS platform image called vrr64 is provided. You can use the jinstall64-vrr package to install the 64-bit virtual route reflector on your device. Raw disk image format is supported for the VRR image. The new Junos OS platform image is converted to kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) or a Quick Emulator (QEMU) disk image, which is launched as a VM on the QEMU hardware virtualizer.