WAN Failover to DR site

[Scott_22]

We currently have all of our equipment in a data center where each of our remote connections terminate via MPLS and site-to-site tunnels. In the event that our main connection goes down, we would like to have all traffic rerouted to our DR site in another data center. What is the best way to execute this? Will we need to use BGP and then advertise the same address space at both locations? This must be a manual fail-over so we could keep the connection at the DR site disabled until a fail-over is needed.

[jmperlewitz]

This is easily accomplished via BGP and you don't even have to do it manually if you wish.  You can have your BGP adjacencies configured to every remote site that you wish.  You can use weight or local preference to engineer which BGP connection you prefer.  You can also use communities to control your inbound traffic preference as well.  If you make your DR site the least preferred BGP, then you will onyl send traffic if your other more preferred BGP adjacencies go down.  Let me know if you need help with examples.

[Scott_22]

Thanks for your response! So correct me with this if I'm wrong (still new to BGP), but will each remote location have an iBGP connection to both data centers? And then the data centers will have eBGP connections with the ISP to advertise our static block? How do we use local preference to prefer which data center to send outbound traffic, and then would we use communities to determine the inbound traffic flow?