Show Menu
Cheatography
  1. Home >
  2. Cheat Sheets >

Arista VXLAN Control Plane Options Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

IP Multicast

VTEPs within a VNI join a configured contro­l-plane multicast group.
BUM traffic is sent to all VTEPs within the VNI over the configured multic­ast­-group.
Arista supports multicast decaps­ulation to intero­perate with third-­party VTEP(s).
The underlay needs to be multicast capable which makes the deployment limited.
Recomm­ended for deploy­ments where Arista VTEPs need to interop with legacy third-­party VTEPs that support only multicast underlay for BUM traffic handling.
 

CloudV­ision eXchange (CVX)

Locally learned MACs and VNI binding published to CVX.
CVX dynami­cally distri­butes state to remote VTEPs.
MAC address learning is via CVX control plane.
Automated provis­ioning of each VTEP’s flood-­list.
No manual overhead for the flood-list when adding­/re­moving VTEP(s).
Reduction in flooded traffic as there’s no flood and learning process.
OVSDB support to allow easily integrate into third-­party controller in the future.
High-A­vai­lab­ility (HA) Cluster support for resili­ency.
Recomm­ended for both small and large deploy­ments where manual flood-list config­uration could be a lot of overhead.
Recomm­ended for cases where there’s a requir­ement to integrate with third-­party contro­llers such as NSX, Nuage, OpenStack, etc.
 

Head End Replic­ation with static flood-set (HER)

BUM traffic within a VNI is replicated and transm­itted unicast to each of the VTEPs in the flood-list for that VNI.
Replic­ation carried out on the ingress VTEP.
MAC address learning occurs via the standard flood and learn process.
Flood-list needs to be edited on all the VTEPs when adding­/re­moving VTEP(s).
No requir­ement for IP multicast in the underlay.
Recomm­ended for small deploy­ments where there’s a handful of VLANs and VTEPs, and in cases where flood-set changes are minimal.
 

Ethernet VPN (EVPN)

MP-BGP is used to distribute local MAC address and MAC/IP bindings to VTEPs.
Reduction in flooded traffic with ARP suppre­ssion in IRB mode. This facili­tates more efficient use of underlay bandwidth.
Dynamic MAC distri­bution and VNI learning; config­uration can be BGP intensive.
Support for third-­party VTEP(s) with standa­rds­-based MP-BGP approach.
Operates outside the CVX model (contr­oll­er-­less).
Recomm­ended for both small and large deploy­ments where standa­rds­-based control plane is a requir­ement.