Canadian LHCONE

Figure 1: Typical design of LHCONE site in Canada.

During the development of the LHCONE in Canada the decision was taken early to avoid any type of Policy Based Routing (PBR) on the advice of the Canadian R&E networking community. We concluded that the best option for sites without dedicated hardware for the LHCONE would be to create a VRF at the site in a configuration shown in Figure 1. The site Local LHCONE VRF is created on the available data centre edge equipment and configured to peer with the CANARIE LHCONE VRF. The Campus Router is set as the default route for the site Local LHCONE VRF to obtain regular R&E IP network connectivity. The CANARIE VRF is configured to accept only pre-negotiated subnets that are known to contain LHC equipment. The Site Local LHCONE VRF does not re-advertise the remote LHCONE routes to the Campus Router to avoid any asymmetric routes.