IP Connect + BGP

What are the settings Cyxtera uses for BGP Timers, Keep-Alive, and Hold Time?

Keep Alive is 30
Hold Time is 90

What ASN should I use as my BGP neighbor?

Your BGP peer ASN will be 12213.

What IP Addresses will be used for BGP peering between my routers and the Cyxtera fabric?

Once you’ve completed ordering IP Connect + BGP and we have verified assignment of the prefixes you wish to advertise we will assign a /30 public CIDR block from Cyxtera’s pool of addresses to support BGP peering between the Cyxtera PE and Customer CE endpoints. The four addresses allocated are intended to be used as two pairs of /31 address spaces for peering between the two sets of routers.
As an example, assume we reserve aa.bb.cc.64/30 for the two sets of routers.
aa.bb.cc.64/31 would be used for Router pair 1
aa.bb.cc.66/31 would be used for Router pair 2
Cyxtera Router 1 would be assigned aa.bb.cc.64/31 and peer with Customer Router 1
Customer Router 1 would be assigned aa.bb.cc.65/31 and peer with Cyxtera Router 1
Cyxtera Router 2 would be assigned aa.bb.cc.66/31 and peer with Customer Router 2
Customer Router 2 would be assigned aa.bb.cc.67/31 and peer with Cyxtera Router 2

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)

Cyxtera supports BFD for all IPv4 BGP customers to assist with failure detection in the network between two neighbors. The Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol is a simple hello mechanism that detects failures in a network. A pair of routing devices exchange BFD packets. The devices send hello packets at a specified, regular interval. The device detects a neighbor failure when the routing device stops receiving a reply after a specified interval. BFD does not have a discovery mechanism; sessions must be explicitly configured between endpoints. BFD is included with your IP Connect service when BGP service is purchased at no additional charge. Configuration parameters are as follows:

Minimum interval: 300 (ms)
Multiplier: 3 (packet loss)
Session mode: Automatic

Minimum interval: The minimum interval (in milliseconds) at which the local routing device transmits hello packets and then expects to receive a reply from a neighbor with which it has established a BFD session.
Multiplier: Configure the number of hello packets not received by a neighbor that causes the originating interface to be declared down.
Session mode: Configure for single hop or multi-hop BGP sessions, this can be left in auto.

Customers also can easily remove sessions as needed. If the customer wishes to discontinue using BFD it is recommended that before removing the config from the endpoint, the customer administratively shutdown the system which will initiate and “AdminDown” to Cyxtera BFD client, this will ensure that the remote system is aware and thus not accidentally triggering an event.

Does Cyxtera support Discard Interfaces/Blackhole Communities?

Cyxtera provides DDoS mitigation by routing traffic to a black hole using Remote Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) filtering at the upstream provider. For BGP customers, we are setup to allow customers to send us BGP communities to initiate RTBH on prefixes up to a /32 when community 12213:666 is attached to the route advertisement.