New Features in 2021
This topic describes the feature enhancements and updates that are part of the Megaport IX route server upgrade. The upgrade process starts in early March and completes in early April. More details about the timing will be emailed to customers on the announcement list for each IX.
MegaIX Looking Glass
The new MegaIX Looking Glass provides full-featured visibility into traffic routing and the IX route server environment. This visibility helps you troubleshoot connections by searching for an AS number, a peer, or a particular IP prefix on the IX route server.
Use the BGP neighbor overview to look at a specific route server. The Looking Glass shows you which networks are available at a specific route server, provides BGP session information (established and down), and provides a summary of received and filtered routes from each peer.
Route server filtering
With this upgrade, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) invalid routes are now filtered and are easy to identify using the new Looking Glass. For more information on RPKI, see any of these helpful references:
- Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)
- BGP Origin Validation
- Read the Docs RPKI Documentation
- RFC 8210
Peer Macro
The Peer Macro option is now enabled for all connections. This value defines the AS macro filter for the peer. Megaport uses it to generate a list of prefixes and origin AS values that an AS can originate, and this list filters announcements through the route server.
Large BGP Community support
The upgraded route servers now support an extended range of action communities that Megaport IX route servers are able to recognize. As part of this, the EURO-IX Large BGP Community standard is now supported. Megaport recommends migrating to these new communities.
Note
MegaIX communities will be supported for 12 months before they are deprecated by Megaport.
BFD support
The route server upgrade passively enables the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol on route servers in all Megaport IX locations with a 300 millisecond interval. The BFD protocol detects any path failures between BGP neighbors.
BGP Add Path
IX now supports the BGP add-path feature to enable advertisements of multiple paths to a single address prefix, without the new paths implicitly replacing any previous paths.
Add-path support provides:
- Optimal routing and routing convergence in a network by providing potential alternate or backup paths.
- BGP traffic load balancing across more than one path.
For more information, see Advertisement of Multiple Paths in BGP.
Note
Your network must support BGP add-path functionality to benefit from its features.