Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Do you have per-function loopback interfaces on your routers? Why (not)?

In some customer environments I've come across routers with lots of loopback interfaces:

  • One for the IGP's RID
  • One for in-band management
  • One for MSDP peering
  • One for sourcing NTP client traffic
  • One for iBGP peering
  • etc...

This CL slide shows a modest example of the phenomenon.

What's the advantage of doing things this way?

I generally create an additional loopback interface when it's really required:

  • a new VRF that doesn't have a loopback, but could benefit from it
  • a service that's known by IP and which I might want to move later (like an NTP server or GRE endpoint.)
  • an instance of an anycast service (these flat-out can't overlap with a unique-per router address.)

I'm guessing there's a philosophy here that I'm missing out on.

Enlighten me?



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