Activating BGP without configuring a peer yet

[Pugmiester]

Hi all,

We're working to deploy a couple of MX's into regional data centres and will be using BGP to peer into the Auto-VPN. We've agreed an internal AS number to assign to the Meraki side but we don't have all of the data centre parts of the system in place yet.

Are we able to still activate the BGP settings in the Auto-VPN so we can get the Meraki side of things updated to BGP and stable again (I understand the Auto-VPN will have to reconfigure itself internally) before we have to add in any BGP peers? I'm assuming we can, it's just not clear from the documentation

[bmehta]

Hello

Can you provide to know more details on what you would mean by Meraki side of things updated to BGP?
On your Meraki organization iBGP information would be exchanged over AutoVPN. When routes are learned from an eBGP neighbor they will distribute to spoke locations via iBGP. If you have not configured eBGP for now then you can  at least make sure the AutoVPN is up between all the locations of your organization. So in the future routes get redistributed correctly. Let me know if it makes sense or you have any concerns. Thank you

[Pugmiester]

Hi,

We've already spoken to Meraki support and they have activated the BGP options for us so we have the BGP settings available in the dashboard. We are planning to activate BGP on the dashboard so that the Auto-VPN can update for iBGP but at this time we do not have any eBGP peers available, the data centre team are still working on them.

It's not clear from the documentation, if we have to enable BGP on the dashboard and at the same time make the peer connection to the data centre routers, but we are hoping that is not the case. We are hoping to just activate the iBGP options and let the Auto-VPN update and re-stabalise and then at a later date we add the peer to the DC router.

[Pugmiester · Accepted solution]

Hi all, just to confirm if anyone runs across this question in the future.

Yes, you can switch the Auto-VPN to using BGP without having to immediately configure any external BGP peers. The Auto-VPN reconfigures itself and although Meraki support suggested there may be some outage time while that happened, with our 25 site mesh we didn't even drop a packet as far as I could tell.