From CCIE Study Wiki

BGP Peer Groups allow you to simplify your configuration when many neighbors share the same update policies. Peer groups also make the actual updating process more efficient.

Theory

Peer group members will inherit the following attributes: min-advertisement interval, next-hop-self, out-route-map, out-filter-list, out-dist-list, remote-as (if configured), version, and update-source.

Configure peer groups by adding neighbor commands that refer to the peer group name.

Commands

• neighbor peer-group-name peer-group (router) - Creates a BGP peer group. Use this same command with various keywords after to set the various peer-group options.

Default Settings

• Members of a peer group will inherit all of the configuration options of that peer group by default. Members can be configured to override the options that do not affect outbound updates.

Verification

• Nothing listed yet

Troubleshooting, Tips, and Tricks

• You can customize inbound policies for peer group members (using, for example, a distribute list, route map, or filter list) because one identical copy of an update is sent to every member of a group. Therefore, neighbor options related to outgoing updates cannot be customized for peer group members.

Online Resources

• CCIE To Be shows a way of using peer session templates to modify BGP timers under a specific lab requirement.

• Explaining and configuring BGP peer groups and BFP peer templates from CCIE Talk.

• CCIE the Beginning has a great explanation of BGP Peer Groups and peer session/peer policy templates.

• debugall discusses the advantages of BGP peer groups.

• Peer groups and peer templates from CCIE Talk.

• Ivan of Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks shows us how to configure BGP peer session templates.

• Explaining BGP peer templates from Packetlife.

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