Building Resilient IP Networks: The Access Module

This chapter is from the book 

Layer 3 Domain

The Layer 3 building block is found mainly in the distribution layer of the multilayer campus design. The function of the building block is mainly to provide for the following:

• A first-hop redundancy function to the hosts that are attached to the access layer
• To announce the routes of the IP subnet sitting behind the distribution layer to the rest of the network
• Other value-added functions that may help in the operation of the network (for example, access control, multicast forwarding, and QoS)

Because of the functions it provides, resiliency at the Layer 3 domain focuses on devices backing up each other in terms of providing all the previously described functions.

Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP)

Most of the end devices such as PCs, laptops, and servers are usually configured with a single default IP gateway. What this means is that if the default IP gateway is unavailable, these devices cannot communicate beyond their subnet. Although a feature such as Router Discovery Protocol may help in looking for another default IP gateway, not many end devices support it. Therefore, ensuring the availability of the default IP gateway is a number one priority.

The Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) is the Cisco implementation of providing a redundant default gateway to the end devices. Essentially, HSRP allows a set of routers to work together so that they appear as one single virtual default gateway to the end devices. It does so by providing a virtual IP (vIP) address and a virtual MAC (vMAC) address to the end devices. The end devices are configured to point their default IP gateway to the vIP address. The end devices also store the virtual vMAC address via Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). This way, HSRP allows two or more routers to back up each other to provide first-hop resiliency. Only one of the routers, the primary gateway, does the actual work of forwarding traffic to the rest of the network. There will be one standby router, whereas the rest will be placed in the listen mode. These routers do not forward traffic from the end hosts. However, for return traffic, they may forward traffic to the devices, depending on the configuration of the IP routing protocol.

Figure 6-27 illustrates the concept of HSRP. When a router participates in a HSRP setup, it exchanges keepalive Hellos with the rest using User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets via a multicast address.

Table 6-5 lists the default configuration values of the HSRP parameters.

Table 6-5. Default Values for HSRP Configuration

Parameter	Default
HSRP group	Not configured
Standby group number	0
Standby MAC address	0000.0c07.acNN where NN is the group number
Standby priority	100
Standby delay	0
Standby track interface priority	10
Standby Hello timer	3 seconds
Standby Hello hold time	10 seconds

Here are some pointers about configuring HSRP:

• The role of primary and standby routers can be selected by assigning a priority value. The default value of the priority is 100, and its range is 0 to 255. The router with the highest priority is selected as the primary, whereas zero means the router will never be the primary gateway. In the event that all the routers have the same priority, the one with the highest IP address is selected as the primary router.
• The priority of the router changes if it has a standby track command configured and is brought into action. The tracking value determines how much priority is decremented when a particular interface that the router tracks goes down. A typical interface that is being tracked is the uplink toward the backbone. When the uplink toward the backbone fails, no traffic can leave the router. Therefore, the primary router should relinquish its role and have its priority lowered so that the standby router can take over its role.
• You can track multiple interfaces, and their failure has a cumulative effect on the priority value of the router, if it has a track interface priority configured. If no track priority value is configured, the default value is 10, and it is not cumulative.
• The default Hello timer is 3 seconds, whereas the hold time is 10 seconds. Hold time is the time taken before the standby declares the primary as unavailable when no more Hello packets are received.

From an IP resiliency standpoint, the focus is on how fast the standby gateway router takes over in the event that the primary gateway is down. Note that this is only for traffic going out from the end devices toward the rest of the network. The downtime experienced by the end devices will be the time it takes for the standby router to take over.

Although the standby router has taken over, its immediate neighbors may still keep the original primary router as the gateway to reach the access network. This happens because their routing tables have not been updated. In this case, for these routing tables to be updated, the routing protocol has to do its job.

The default Hello timer for HSRP is 3 seconds, and the hold time is 10 seconds. This means that when the primary router is down, end devices cannot communicate with the rest of the network for as long as 10 seconds or more. The Hello timer feature has since been enhanced so that the router sends out Hellos in milliseconds. With this enhancement, it is possible for the standby router to take over in less than a second, as demonstrated in Example 6-14.

Example 6-14. Configuring HSRP Fast Hello

Router#configuration terminal
Router(config)#interface fastEthernet 1/1
Router(config-if)#ip address 10.1.1.253 255.255.255.0
Router(config-if)#standby 1 ip 10.1.1.254
Router(config-if)#standby 1 timers msec 200 msec 750
Router(config-if)#standby 1 priority 150
Router(config-if)#standby 1 preempt
Router(config-if)#standby 1 preempt delay minimum 180

In Example 6-14, the router R1 has been configured with a virtual IP address of 10.1.1.254, and its priority is 150. For R1 to be the primary router, the rest will have a default priority value of 100. R1 sends out a Hello packet every 200 ms with a hold time of 750 ms. The function of the preempt command allows R1 to take over the forwarding function after it has recovered from its error, or after it has been reloaded. The preempt delay timer is to force R1 to wait for the indicated amount of time, in this case 180 seconds, before claiming back its role. This is to prevent it from taking over the HSRP primary role without a proper routing table.

Up to this point, HSRP may not seem like an efficient solution, because only one router, R1, is performing the forwarding function. The rest of the routers are simply not used at all. This might not even be a cost-effective solution, especially if all the HSRP routers are WAN routers with expensive WAN links as their uplinks. Because only the primary router is forwarding traffic, the rest of the WAN links on R2 and R3 will be left underutilized. The Multigroup HSRP (MHSRP) feature is used to solve this problem.

You can configure MHSRP on a pair of routers. Both the routers R1 and R2 are configured with multiple HSRP groups. For each of the HSRP groups, there is a unique virtual IP address with a virtual MAC address. Group 1 has R1 as the primary router and R2 as the standby. Group 2 has R2 as the primary and R1 as a standby. The end devices are separated into groups by configuring their default gateway to point to the different virtual IP addresses. Half the end devices will default the route to group 1's virtual IP address; the rest will default the route to group 2's virtual IP address. Figure 6-28 illustrates the concept.

In this case, both the uplinks of R1 and R2 are utilized, because both are acting as the primary router for separate HSRP groups. Whenever the primary router of a group fails, the standby for that group takes over the duty of forwarding traffic.

Example 6-15 shows the configuration needed for R1.

Example 6-15. Configuration of HSRP on R1

R1#configuration terminal
R1(config)#interface ethernet1/0
R1(config-if)#ip address 10.1.1.250 255.255.255.0
R1(config-if)#standby 1 preempt
R1(config-if)#standby 1 ip 10.1.1.254
R1(config-if)#standby 1 track Serial0
R1(config-if)#standby 2 ip 10.1.1.253
R1(config-if)#standby 2 track serial 0
R1(config-if)#standby 2 priority 95

Example 6-16 shows the configuration needed for R2.

Example 6-16. Configuration of HSRP on R2

R2#configuration terminal
R2(config)#interface ethernet1/0
R2(config-if)#interface ethernet1/0
R2(config-if)#ip address 10.1.1.251 255.255.255.0
R2(config-if)#standby 1 ip 10.1.1.254
R2(config-if)#standby 1 track Serial0
R2(config-if)#standby 1 priority 95
R2(config-if)#standby 2 preempt
R2(config-if)#standby 2 ip 10.1.1.253
R2(config-if)#standby 2 track serial 0

MHSRP solves the problem of wasted uplink bandwidth of the standby router in HSRP. However, it adds complexity because the clients now have to have separate default gateway addresses. If the clients have their IP address assigned by a DHCP server, some mechanism has to be built in to distribute the clients to point to different default gateways. In this case, you might have added complexity for the sake of load balancing traffic on the various uplinks.

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)

The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), which is defined in RFC 2338, is the IETF standard version of a first-hop redundancy protocol. Its function is similar to that of HSRP. Routers participating in a VRRP setup are known as VRRP routers. These routers work together to provide what is known as a VRRP virtual router. There can be many virtual routers, each identified through a virtual router identifier (VRID). This is similar to the group ID assigned in MHSRP configuration.

In a similar concept as that of HSRP, VRRP routers elect a master router based on a priority value. The master router then sends out advertisements to the rest of the participating routers for keepalive. The minimum value of the advertisement interval is 1 second. In this case, the take over timing may not be as fast as that provided by HSRP. With VRID, VRRP can also provide a load-sharing mechanism to utilize all uplinks.

Global Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP)

In providing a first-hop redundancy solution, both HSRP and VRRP implement the concept of a single primary and multiple secondary gateways. Under normal working conditions, only the primary is actively forwarding traffic for the hosts; the secondary is not. This is costly, especially when both the uplinks from the gateways are expensive WAN circuits. Suppose the primary gateway has never encountered any problems; the secondary gateway may be forgotten after some time, or worse still, its failure may not be noticed.

MHSRP may be able to achieve a certain degree of load balancing for the uplinks; however, the complexity of configuring the end devices to have a different default IP gateway may outweigh the benefits. This is especially so if a DHCP is involved. Not many DHCP servers can assign a default IP gateway in a round-robin fashion.

The aim of the Global Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP) is to provide the basic function of first-hop redundancy, and at the same time achieve load balancing in terms of uplinks. GLBP combines the benefits of both HSRP and MHSRP. In a GLBP setup, routers work together to present a common virtual IP address to the clients. However, instead of using a single virtual MAC address tied to a virtual IP address, different virtual MAC addresses are tied to a single virtual IP address. These different virtual MAC addresses are sent to different end devices through the ARP process. This way, different end devices forward traffic to the different virtual MAC addresses for forwarding to the rest of the network.

In a GLBP setup, as shown in Figure 6-29, a router is elected to be the active virtual gateway (AVG). The AVG acts as the master of the group. In Figure 6-27, R1 has been elected as the AVG. The job of the AVG is to assign a virtual MAC address to each GLBP member. These members then become the active virtual forwarder (AVF) for that virtual MAC address. For example, R2 is an AVF for the virtual MAC 0007.b400.0102. The AVF is responsible for forwarding traffic that was sent to their virtual MAC address. Other members may be assigned as a secondary virtual forwarder (SVF) in case the AVF fails. In Figure 6-29, R3 is the SVF for R2. One important job of the AVG is to respond to all ARP requests sent out by the end devices. The end devices send out an ARP request for the common virtual IP address. The AVG assigns a different virtual MAC to different end devices based on a preset algorithm. It may be assigned the virtual MAC in a round-robin or weighted fashion. In this manner, all the clients share the same default gateway IP address, which resolves into different MAC addresses, depending on which AVF has been assigned.

The election of the AVG is the same as that of HSRP. The candidate is elected based on the glbp priority command. The one with the highest priority is elected the AVG. In the event of a tie, the one with the highest IP address is elected. There is another one elected as the standby; the rest are placed in listen mode.

The members of the GLBP group communicate with each other via a multicast address 224.0.0.102 and UDP port number 3222. The virtual MAC address takes the form of 0007.b4nn.nnnn. The last 24 bits of the MAC address consists of six zeros, 10 bits for indicating the group number and 8 bits for the virtual forwarder number. This means GLBP can support 1024 groups, each with 255 forwarders. However, in practice, four virtual forwarders are configurable for each of the groups.

The virtual forwarders are each assigned a virtual MAC address and act as the primary forwarder for that MAC address instance. The rest of the routers in the group learn of this virtual forwarding instance via Hello messages and create their own backup instance. These are known as the secondary virtual forwarders. The working of the primary and secondary forwarders depends on the four timers that are important in the GLBP operation:

• Hello time— The Hello time is learned from the AVG, or it can be manually configured. The default is 3 seconds, and the range is 50 ms to 60 seconds.
• Hold time— The hold time is used to determine whether action is required to take over the virtual gateway or virtual forwarder function. This timer is reset whenever a Hello is received from the partners. The hold time must be greater than three times that of the Hello timer. The hold time can be learned from the AVG or manually configured. The default is 10 seconds, and the range is 1 to 180 seconds.
• Redirect time— This is the time in which the AVG continues to redirect clients to the AVF. The redirect time can be learned from the AVG or manually configured. The default is 5 minutes, and the range is 1 second to 60 minutes.
• Secondary hold time— This is the period of time for which an SVF remains valid after the AVF is unavailable. The SVF is deleted when the secondary hold time expires. When the SVF is deleted, the load-balancing algorithm is changed to allocate forwarding to the remaining VFs. This timer should be longer than the ARP cache age of the client. This timer can be learned from the AVG or manually. The default is 1 hour, and the range is 40 minutes to 18 hours.

There are three ways clients can be assigned to a particular virtual forwarder:

• Weighted load balancing— The number of clients directed to an AVF depends on the weight assigned to it. All the virtual forwarders within a router use this weight.
• Host-dependent load balancing— The decision of which AVF to direct to depends on the MAC address of the client. This way, a client is always directed to the same virtual MAC address.
• Round-robin load balancing— As the name implies, the virtual MAC addresses are assigned to the clients in a round-robin fashion. This method is recommended for a subnet with a small number of clients. This is the default method.

If no load-balancing algorithm is specified, the AVG responds to all ARP requests with its own VF MAC address. In this case, the whole operation is similar to that of HSRP.

Similar to HSRP, GLBP can track interfaces. In fact, with the introduction of the Enhanced Object Tracking feature in Cisco IOS, GLBP can track and react to errors arising from the following entities:

• Interfaces or subinterfaces
• IP routes
• All IP service level agreement (IP SLA) operations
• Object lists via Boolean operations (for example, AND and OR)

Example 6-17 shows how to configure GLBP on router R1.

Example 6-17. Configuring GLBP on R1

R1#configuration terminal
R1(config)#interface fastethernet 0/0
R1(config-if)#ip address 10.1.1.250 255.255.255.0
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 ip 10.1.1.254
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 forwarder preempt delay minimum 60
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 load-balancing host-dependent
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 preempt delay minimum 60
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 priority 254
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 timers 5 18
R1(config-if)#glbp 10 timers redirect 600 7200

GLBP combines the benefits of HSRP and MHSRP to achieve both first-hop resiliency and load balancing of traffic. It is especially important in a typical branch setup, which requires two WAN routers to provide a redundant setup. With GLBP, both the WAN links of the routers can be better utilized so that investment can be maximized. In addition, it is also good to use both links to verify their integrity. If a link is only used for redundancy purposes, it might not be possible to ascertain its quality until a failure has occurred. This may be too late.

Layer 3 Best Practices

This section looks at some Layer 3 best practices that focus on improving network resiliency. Besides providing a redundant first-hop gateway service to the access layer, another important task that the distribution layer has to perform is to provide robust IP connectivity for the access layer to the core layer. Besides providing a reroute capability in the event that a link for a device fails, the Layer 3 routing protocol can also provide load-balancing capability to achieve better throughput.

Adopt Topology-Based Switching

Recall in the previous section, "Layer 3 Domain," that the Layer 3 building blocks are found in the distribution layer. This is where Layer 3 switching products are deployed to fulfill the role. In the selection of a Layer 3 switch, it is important to note that the switching hardware architecture does have a bearing on the resiliency of the IP network.

Figure 6-30 shows a switching product that is based on flow-based architecture. In this architecture, the switch forwards traffic by sending the first packet of a traffic flow to the CPU. The CPU determines the outgoing port so that all subsequent packets are switched via hardware. The CPU also keeps a record of this flow in a hardware cache. In this architecture, the first packet of every flow involves the CPU of the switch. Flow-based architecture is a popular way to build a Layer 3 switch and can be found in many products on the market today.

The problem with flow-based architecture is that every traffic flow is maintained in the cache, and this takes up memory. For a Layer 3 switch performing the role at the distribution layer, it can potentially be supporting hundreds and even thousands of hosts. These hosts can create huge numbers of flows that need to be maintained in the cache. With hosts entering and leaving the network over time, huge amounts of CPU and memory resources are needed to maintain the cache. This strain on the control-plane resources is most pronounced when there is a DoS attack on the distribution layer. With a flow-based architecture, it will quickly run out of resources trying to maintain the millions of flows that were generated by the attack. The resiliency of the entire distribution building block will be jeopardized in this scenario, because the control plane has run out of resources.

In contrast to a flow-based architecture, a topology-based switching architecture is another way to build a Layer 3 switch. As discussed in the section "Cisco Express Forwarding" in Chapter 3, "Fundamentals of IP Resilient Networks," CEF is an example of a topology-based switching architecture.

Figure 6-31 shows the concept of a topology-based switching architecture. In this architecture, the CPU first builds the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) and adjacency table and pushes the information down to the ASIC in the line cards. Based on this information, the line card hardware can then forward traffic without the intervention of the CPU. With topology-based switching architecture, the CPU and its memory have been moved out of the way of all the traffic flows. Therefore, regardless of the number of hosts entering and leaving the network, the control plane of the distribution layer is not affected. Provided the DoS attack is targeted at the Layer 3 switch itself, the millions of flows that are created during the attack will have little impact on the control plane of the switch.

Therefore, a Layer 3 switch with a topology-based architecture is recommended to perform the role of the distribution layer. This is especially so if the Layer 3 switch is also to be used as in the core layer. Switches that incorporate topology-based architecture include the Catalyst 4500 and Catalyst 6500 series.

Using Equal-Cost Multipath

It is important to understand the routing protocol behavior with respect to topology so that you can exploit certain characteristics to achieve resiliency. Because protocols such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) work on the basis of path cost, you should always try to strive for a equal-cost multipath (ECMP) topology. It just means trying to create a topology with at least two equal-cost paths between a source and a destination. An ECMP topology allows traffic to be load balanced on multiple paths, thus achieving better performance. In addition, in the event that one of the paths fails, ECMP can transfer traffic to the remaining working path in an instant. One simple rule to remember about constructing an ECMP environment is that triangular topology is always preferred, the same as in the Layer 2 network design. In addition, it is also important to know how the router behaves in an ECMP environment.

In an ECMP environment, the router takes advantage of the multiple links and tries to load balance traffic based on two algorithms: per destination or per packet.

With per-destination load balancing, the router sends packets destined on the same path. Unequal use of the multiple paths may occur if most traffic is bound for one particular host. For example, only two hosts are communicating, and they are sending out a huge amount of traffic. However, with more hosts receiving traffic, the multiple paths are better utilized. Prior to CEF, the route cache was used to maintain the distribution of traffic across the multiple paths for these hosts. And the router had to build an entry for every host. This may also be a strain on the control plane of the router.

With per-packet load balancing, the router sends packets across all the multiple paths in a round-robin fashion, which is a more balanced use of the multiple paths. Prior to CEF, this was done through process switching, and, therefore, this feature suffers from performance penalty.

Recall from the section "Cisco Express Forwarding" in Chapter 3 that CEF takes advantage of the separation between the forwarding table and the adjacency table to provide a better form of packet routing technology. With CEF, for per-destination load balancing, it does not need to build a cache entry for every host that needs load balancing. This frees up the control-plane resources and is especially important in building a resilient IP network. For per-packet load balancing, CEF does not need the help of the CPU to determine the next path for a packet to take. So there is minimal impact to the CPU load.

Therefore, to fully take advantage of the benefits of a multipath topology, you need a good understanding of the load balancing algorithms and their impact on the load on the control plane. CEF is again recommended for the implementation of an ECMP environment.

Conserve Peering Resources

The distribution layer terminates the VLANs coming from the access layer. Chances are, devices residing within these VLANs are end stations such as PCs or servers. These end stations rely on a default gateway to get connected to the rest of the network and do not normally run routing protocols. In this case, there is no need for the distribution layer to maintain any Layer 3 peering relationships with the devices in the VLANs. Cutting down on unnecessary peering will help conserve CPU and memory resources on the distribution layer switch, as shown in Figure 6-32.

Adopt a Hierarchical Addressing Scheme

A basic rule that always holds true is this: The fewer the routes in the network, the faster it can converge. Therefore, it is worthwhile to adopt a hierarchical IP addressing scheme. A proper IP addressing scheme enables you to design the network in a hierarchical manner, where the routing table in the core should be less than that at the edge of the network.

In conjunction with concepts such as areas in the OSPF protocol, IP addresses at the edge of the network can be summarized and represented by a single entry in the core. There are at least two advantages in doing so. First, because of the area design, errors such as link failure are concealed from the rest of the network. The error messages are propagated only within the area. Second, when errors occur within the area, no changes are required in the routing table for routers in other areas, because the summarized entry is still valid. As long as there are minimal changes to the routing table, the network will always remain stable. Figure 6-33 illustrates the concept of using areas in OSPF.