Virtual routing and forwarding

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Virtual routing and forwarding" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In IP-based computer networks, virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) is a technology that allows multiple instances of a routing table to co-exist within the same router at the same time. One or more logical or physical interfaces may have a VRF and these VRFs do not share routes. Therefore, the packets are only forwarded between interfaces on the same VRF. VRFs are the TCP/IP layer 3 equivalent of a VLAN. Because the routing instances are independent, the same or overlapping IP addresses can be used without conflicting with each other. Network functionality is improved because network paths can be segmented without requiring multiple routers.^[1]