Saturday 18 March 2017

What is VxLAN


Virtual extensible Local Area Network
A L2 in L3 overlay tunnel

  • Specifically an ethernet in UDP tunnel 
  • technically agnostic to the data plane encapsulation 


Why use VxLAN
  • expands vlan name space : vlan 2power12  
  •                                             vxlan 2power24
  • Allows layer 2 multipathing 
  1. don't need stp for loop prevention
  2. uses layer 3 ECMP over CLOS fabric
  • similar login to fabricpath
  • Includes scaling enhancements 
  1.  Optimizes control plane, e.g  MAC learning , ARP Tables, BUM replication etc.
  • Dose not break layer 2 adjacency requirements
  1. Allows for any to any stateless layer 2 & layer 3 transport E.g vMotion
  • Allows for multi tenancy  
  • Separations of customer traffic over shared underlay fabric 
  • Allows for overlapping L2 & L3 addresses e.g VLANs & ips are locally significant 

VxLAN Terminology 
  • Underlay Network: Provides transport for VxLAN  , i.e ospf , eigrp , is-is routed fabric
  • overlay Network  : Uses the service provided by VxLAN 
  • VNI/VNID : VxLAN network Identifier
  • VTEP : VxLAN tunnel end point
  1. Box that performs VxLAN encap/decap
  2. Could by H/W or S/W
  3. E.g Nexus 5600 vs Nexus 1000V
  • VxLAN segment : - the resulting layer 2 overlay n/w
  • VxLAN Gateway 
  1. Device that forwards traffic between Vxlans
  2. Can be both L2 & L3 forwarding 
  • NVE : Network Virtualization Edge 
  1.  Logical representation of the VTEP
  2. i.e NVE is the tunnel interface 


VxLAN Encapsulation : 




Basic VxLAN Workflow:

  • Receive ARP From local host
  • Assume a miss occurs
  • Find the remote VTEP
  1. Multicast flood & Learn
  2. Ingress replication
  3. MP-BGP L2VPN EVPN
  • Unicast encap frame towards the VTEP
  •  Throws away the VLAN
  • Replace it with the VNID






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