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An increasingly important requirement of networking equipment is to rapidly detect communication
failures between network systems to quickly establish alternative paths and reduce network convergence
time. Data link hardware such as SONET alarms make failure detection fairly easy and quick. However,
some media, such as Ethernet, do not support such kind of signaling, and some media can not detect
certain kinds of failures in the path, such as failing interfaces or forwarding engine components.
In the absence of such signaling hardware, networks resort to using simple "Hello" mechanisms to detect
failures in the communication pathways between adjacent systems. One such mechanism is the
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol.
BFD protocol is a fairly simple and quick Hello protocol; it can be configured on the interfaces with
routing protocols to rapidly detect faults in the bidirectional paths between adjacent forwarding engines,
including data link(s) and forwarding engines. BFD is not intended to directly control liveliness
information; instead, the application provides parameters and BFD supplies the state of the session. It acts
in an advisory role to the control protocols. It provides a low overhead alternative to detect faults for all
media types and routing protocols in a variety of network environments and topologies. BFD protocol
sessions can be initiated for any remote IP address reachable through outgoing IP interface ports.
In This Chapter
This chapter describes the basic components of BFD and how to configure them through the Command
Line Interface (CLI). CLI commands are used in the configuration examples; for more details about the
syntax of commands, see the OmniSwitch CLI Reference Guide.
Configuration procedures described in this chapter include:
•
Global Configuration (see
•
Interface Level Configuration (see
•
OSPF level configuration (see
•
BGP Level Configuration (see
•
VRRP Level Configuration (see
•
Static Routing Level Configuration (see
OmniSwitch AOS Release 7 Network Configuration Guide
16 Configuring BFD
page
16-11).
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16-11).
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16-15).
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16-18).
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16-19).
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16-21).
March 2011
page 16-1
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