EVPN Technical Deep Dive

We'll start with a very brief description of what EVPN does and how it all started, and explore EVPN functionality, from basic bridging to MAC mobility, proxy ARP, integrated routing and bridging, and EVPN-based MLAG.

In this section Dinesh Dutt describes how to use EVPN with VXLAN in a data center environment, and how to keep your deployment as simple as possible.

EVPN started as a L2VPN technology, but even there its creators tried to solve a plethora of problems including:

• Dual-attached endpoints
• Ingress replication versus IP multicast or MPLS P2MP flooding
• ARP suppression

Integrated routing and bridging (IRB) is the most complex part of EVPN. You could choose between centralized or distributed routing, and between asymmetrical (routing on ingress) or symmetrical (routing on ingress and egress) routing.

When deploying EVPN in large data center fabrics, it makes sense to split the EVPN fabric into smaller layer-2 forwarding domains connected to the central layer-3 backbone.

This section describes the differences between more traditional MLAG solutions and EVPN Multihoming (connecting the same customer to multiple PE devices), illustrating the differences using Cisco's new approach to MLAG: vPC Fabric Peering.

VXLAN BGP EVPN fabric supports the well-known use-cases of Firewall and Load Balancer insertion, more commonly referred to as Layer-4 to Layer-7 Network Services.

This section covers the concepts around Tenant Edge, Intra Tenant and the combination of both, including advanced scenarios using policy-based routing for traffic redirection.

In this part of the webinar Dinesh Dutt explained what it means to run EVPN on Linux hosts, the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, and how to make it work with FRR routing suite.

Could you combine data center switches from various vendors in a single EVPN network? Is there a vendor-proof design? What are the common gotchas? Which vendors are easier to use together? You'll get answers to these (and numerous other) questions in this section.

Krzysztof Szarkowicz described how EVPN works with MPLS transport, and how service providers use EVPN with MPLS to build next-generation L2VPN and L3VPN networks.