Reserved IP Address Range for Testing — RFC 2544

I have been look­ing at a multi host data centre and am using MPLS to securely share cer­tain resources and con­sid­er­ing what archi­tec­ture con­sid­er­a­tions for Network Management.

Lets define the prob­lem. Network Management is soft­ware and serv­ers that col­lect data from my net­work equip­ment and presents it to me in some use­ful form. Add to this some doc­u­ment­a­tion and pro­cess sup­port tools such as a wiki that holds doc­u­ment­a­tion or a ser­vice such as help­desk package.

The serv­ers have to have IP addresses but what addresses to alloc­ate ? If I use some­thing from the RFC1918 address­ing then it is pos­sible that a given VRF might need to use that range. I don’t need the hassle of buy­ing and main­tain­ing rout­able addresses (although for a very large data centre this would be easy enough to do).

So I spent some time research­ing the RFC’s and found this little gem.

RFC 2544 — Introduction

RFC2544 Benchmarking Methodology for Network Interconnect Devices
“ This document defines a specific set of tests that vendors can use to measure and report the performance characteristics of network devices. The results of these tests will provide the user comparable data from different vendors with which to evaluate these devices.”

The remainder RFC, which must be a pre­cursor Scott Bradner set­ting up his test­ing lab, of this dis­cusses bench­mark­ing and test schemas. Deep inside this RFC you will find ref­er­ences to 198.18÷16 IP addresses. I did a search across the RFCs on this address and found RFC3330

RFC 3330 — Special-​​Use IPv4 Addresses

Special-​​Use IPv4 Addresses

This RFC out­lines which address ranges are not routed on the Internet and shows the alloc­a­tion that have been recovered to pro­long the life of IPV4. But search­ing in here find this:


198.18.0.0/15 - This block has been allocated for use in benchmark tests of network interconnect devices. Its use is documented in [RFC 2544].

So a care­ful read of the RFC 3330 shows that this address range is not sched­uled for alloc­a­tion on the Internet and has been alloc­ated for use by test­ing com­pan­ies so that if they pub­lish their con­fig­ur­a­tions and res­ults, you can use the same addresses to do the same tests yourself

I have found the IP address alloc­a­tion for my Network Management zone in my design. It is not com­monly used by cus­tomer plat­forms, because is is a bogon net­work it is secure to use.

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