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Creating a network, BGP announcing
Hey,
I am looking to build 3x modern ~$3000 servers with superMicro boards, and put each in a 2U
I am going to take care of the legal part, form a company and create a TOS with a lawyer.
The company will operate domestically, I believe there is place for competition here.
Basically I have an access to an office where I can put the rack,
and I can get a 10Gbps (XGS-PON) line there.
I can also get my generator to there to be prepared for power outage issues, although power uptime there is 99.9%+ anyways.
I am looking to provide VPSs so I would need at least 50 ips,
and I figured in theory how to register an ASN and rent a subnet.
Now my question is, is it possible to utilize my ASN and do the BGP announcement from my office? What router would I need for that?
I understand that in this progress I am basically forming a Network with my 10Gbps ISP being my upstream.
Or should I make a GRE Tunnel to a rented colo 1u and make the BGP announcement from there? Note: This one was a suggestion I found, I don't know how its actually done.
I'm wondering if someone understands me and could tell me if I am on the right path and maybe point out some resources where I can learn how to do this.
Edit: One extra small question, if I decide to do a full colo and not host it in an office,
And I get a /28 subnet from my Colo DC, how do I utilize it? Could I just plug the 10Gbps cable to my mobo/network card and I would be able to use all the /28 IP's on Virtualizor?
Comments
Correction, you would need a /24. The minimum routable unit for IPv4.
Here https://github.com/cpc2018/my-first-colo
First, try and find out what you need to do to get a BGP session with your local ISP.. First and second level support will have no idea what you are talking about though and just say 'no' because they have no idea..
Otherwise what you want to do is very easy with RouterOS (Mikrotik) routers. We're doing similar with our colo rack and other locations, but we are not using it much hosting for clients though, it works but isn't great..
Announce it at the datacentre, not the office, then use a static route to route it to the office over your tunnel is easier than announcing it from your office.
I've done the BGP over GRE tunnel thing when a business I was working at acquired another webhosting company. In my case, we had acquired a bunch of dedicated servers that could easily be imaged and converted into virtual machines - so the plan was to remotely image them, drag the images across the wire, and continue hosting them on their old IP address space from their old facility in our new facility
Sidebar - before you judge, this was a business decision to acquire the older hosting company and, NT4 was old at that time.. I don't know how they were even running but I can guess why they were for sale Step 2 was to move all of those dedicated hosting customers to shared hosting and a modern control panel.
The question is: did it work. Yes, it worked. I was actually surprised at how well it worked. Would I recommend it? No. The only reason I went down that road is because, in addition to everything else, the IP addresses from the acquired host were not portable from their provider so I had to find a way to make them portable to our facility ~2500km away. What was good about it? We immediately had access to the centralized services that were stood up in the new location and everything looked like it came from our facility. What was bad? There is overhead. This was a long time ago but I think we were sustaining about 50-100 mbps at that time. At modern webhosting bandwidths and with new demands being placed on providers - I don't know. You have 2x the number of opportunities for physical network outages. Plus, at that time, the GRE tunnel was stable enough but it was not perfect and it required some care and feeding.
You sound like you want to do it right so do it right. If you only have a single upstream, you might even be able to just get the IP addresses from them directly and save yourself the problem of BGP. Adding BGP is only required if you want to balance between two upstreams. Your ISP will just give you one static IP address and set up the routing at their end for you (like, they may be able to assign you a /26 of assignable addresses). Some people here may poo-poo that idea but if a person is just getting started, it could be a very cost-effective way to get into the business without burdening yourself having to babysit that stupid GRE tunnel.
_I am looking to provide VPSs so I would need at least 50 ips,
and I figured in theory how to register an ASN and rent a subnet.
_
if you are getting an public AS for routing a /24 subnet is minimum to advertise (/48 for ipv6). Does your IPS support transit (are they willing to peer with you). One of the down sides of GRE is impact on the mtu size (1476 bytes instead of 1500).
If you only have one provider, they might be able to announce a subnet for you (so no GRE tunnel). that would save you the hassle of figuring out BGP a you would just get a default gateway from them. * there is not really a benefit in doing BGP with one ISP
_Edit: One extra small question, if I decide to do a full colo and not host it in an office,
And I get a /28 subnet from my Colo DC, how do I utilize it? Could I just plug the 10Gbps cable to my mobo/network card and I would be able to use all the /28 IP's on Virtualizor?
_
You would always lose at least one (up to 3 ip's for redundancy) for a gateway address.
If you are setting up colo, save yourself a LOT of trouble and put your SuperMicro servers there too.
Regarding the extra question, it depends on how the provider configures your /28. If it's /28 within a bigger range, you can utilize all addresses. If it's a separate vlan with regular termination, you will have 3 addresses unusable. Also, it can be an unnamed termination, which depends on its configuration.