Your software release may not support all the features documented in this module. For the latest caveats and feature information, see Bug Search Tool and the release notes for your platform and software release. To find information about the features documented in this module, and to see a list of the releases in which each feature is supported, see the feature information table.

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The EIGRP IPv6 VRF-Lite feature provides separation between routing and forwarding, which supports an additional level of security because communication between devices belonging to different VRFs is not allowed, unless explicitly configured. While the EIGRP IPv6 VRF-Lite feature supports multiple VRFs, the feature also simplifies the management and troubleshooting of traffic belonging to a specific VRF.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) provide a secure way for customers to share bandwidth over a service provider backbone network. A VPN is a collection of sites sharing a common routing table. A customer site is connected to the service provider network by one or more interfaces, and the service provider associates each interface with a VPN routing table. A VPN routing table is called a VPN routing/forwarding (VRF) table.

VRF-lite allows a service provider to support two or more VPNs with an overlapping IP address using one interface. VRF-lite uses input interfaces to distinguish routes for different VPNs and forms virtual packet-forwarding tables by associating one or more Layer 3 interfaces with each VRF. Interfaces in a VRF can be either physical, such as Ethernet ports, or logical, such as VLAN SVIs, but a Layer 3 interface cannot belong to more than one VRF at any time.

Note	The EIGRP IPv6 VRF-Lite feature is available only in EIGRP named configurations.

Configuring the router eigrp command with the virtual-instance-name argument creates an EIGRP configuration referred to as the EIGRP named configuration or EIGRP named mode. An EIGRP named configuration does not create an EIGRP routing instance by itself; it is a base configuration that is required to define address-family configurations that are used for routing.

In EIGRP named configurations, EIGRP VPNs can be configured in IPv4 and IPv6 named configurations. A VRF instance and a route distinguisher must be defined before the address family session can be created.

A single EIGRP routing process can support multiple VRFs. The number of VRFs that can be configured is limited only by the available system resources on the device, which is determined by the number running processes and available memory. However, only a single VRF can be supported by each VPN, and redistribution between different VRFs is not supported.