Route Distinguisher vs Route Target

MPLS Tutorial Part 1

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Route Distinguisher vs Route Target arent they the same thing? No!
In this post I am going to clarify the difference between route distinguisher and route
target within the Cisco world of MPLS VPNs. The main problem comes from the fact
that in most Cisco Press books they always show the route distinguisher value and
route target value as the same which is just confusing!
They are not the same and are used for completely different things.
In simple terms the route distinguisher is used to create a unique 96 bit address
called the VPNv4 address.
This ensures that if two customers are running the 10.0.0.0/8 address space that
each companies addresses are unique within the MPLS network.
The Route Target is a 64 bit BGP community used to tag prefixes. It tells the PE
routers which prefixes it can import.

Route Distinguisher
The route distinguisher has only one purpose, to make IPv4 prefixes globally unique.
It is used by the PE routers to identify which VPN a packet belongs to, e.g to enable
a router to distinguish between 10.0.0.1/8 for Customer A and 10.0.0.1/8 for
Customer B. The route distinguisher is made up of an 8 octet field prefixed to to the
customer IPv4 address, the resulting 12 octect field make a unique VPNv4 address.
For more info on this please refer toRFC 4364
Configuring a Route Distinguisher

The RD value used in the network is entirely the choice of the network admin. There
are best practices but the number chosen can by any value to make sure the VPNv4
address is unique. Some engineers choose to use the AS number followed by a site
ID
e.g 65335:10 Where 65335 is the AS number for the site and 10 is a site ID

To configure the route distinguisher first you need to define your vrf and then you
can define its route distinguisher.

R1(config)#ip vrf Customer_A

If we do rd ? you can see the options for configuring the RD as described above
R1(config-vrf)#rd ?
ASN:nn or IP-address:nn VPN Route Distinguisher
For the purpose of this description I will configure the RD value as 65355:10
R1(config-vrf)#rd 65355:10
To verify this value enter the command sh ip vrf
R1#sh ip vrf
Name Default RD Interfaces
Customer_A 65355:10

Route Target
The route target on the other had is an 8 byte field which is a BGP extended
Communities Attribute defined in RFC 4360 it defines which prefixes are exported
and imported on the PE routers. So for example consider the diagram below. R3
has 2 VRFs configured on it Customer_A and Customer_B so you would define
under each vrf a unique route target value, these take the same format as the route
distinguisher, but for the purpose of this explanation we are going to use 1:1 for
Customer_A and 2:2 for Customer_B. On R3 we want to export and import the
prefixes for Customer A and B, however on R1 we only want to import and export the
prefixes for Customer_A and on R2 we only want to import and export the prefixes
for Customer_B

Difference between route distinguisher and route target

To conclude, the route distinguisher and route target values perform two completely
separate functions, and although in a lot of cisco press publications the values are
the same (which they can be) it is confusing to someone learning MPLS for the first
time as they assume they do the same thing.
The route distinguisher makes a unique VPNv4 address across the MPLS network
The route target defines which prefixes get imported and exported on the PE routers.