BGP 011: multiple sessions with upstreams

["Edward B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam () noc everquick net>]

Greetings,


I seek comments/feedback/URLs over what IMHO is an elementary issue, but
one in which I'm having little luck seeing eye-to-eye with another
provider.  They have a couple 6500s for edge agg, yet are hesitant to
allow downstreams [with multiple border routers] to establish multiple
BGP sessions:

        Our current policy is to provide one BGP session per customer.
        Our intent in providing the port on the second [6500] is to
        provide the customer with a failover redundancy as opposed to a
        load balancing redundancy.

        Would you please provide in detail your reasoning for needing
        the two BGP sessions and also why you would not need two
        sessions with [other upstreams].

I'm trying to persuade them that two provider/customer BGP sessions is a
good thing, and NEXT_HOP set to the HSRP-managed IP address would allow
them to steer customer traffic.  Their argument is that one can "get
extra bandwidth" with two BGP sessions, and that HSRP prevents that.
I've pointed out that equal-cost multipath BGP is far from default
behavior, and that one can "get extra bandwidth" even without two BGP
sessions.

Am I missing something?  I've attempted to stress the need for
redundancy, and highlighted that they themselves have a couple border
routers which presumably have dynamic routing sessions to both edge
switches.

Suggestions?

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Eddy
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