[ixpmanager] Allowing access to separate fabrics

[Nick Hilliard (INEX)]

Justin Wilson (Lists) wrote on 17/09/2020 22:06:
> We have some peering fabrics connected together via some transport
> links.  I want to give access to peers across these transport links.
> However these links are not fast enough to be fully meshed.  I am
> thinking of having customers get Its assigned on each fabric and
> trunked. This way I can control traffic via communities.
> 
> Is there a more elegant way folks have come up with?

This is a generic IXP question rather than anything IXP Manager specific.

This is difficult.  There's no particularly good way to do this and 
you'll end up optimising for function vs cost.  One option would be to 
set up a separate VLAN for each site group.  This is messy and doesn't 
scale.  Another option would be to block MAC addresses from traversing 
the links.  This will cause serious L2 forwarding problems though, 
particularly if you use route servers.

There's no good way of handling this at layer 2 because Layer 2 assumes 
that all hosts on a broadcast domain are equally available.  If you 
introduce connectivity options which don't fit this model, then breakage 
will happen.

Nick