When companies deploy any particular technology, the first question that they should ask is whether particular technology brings any benefits or advantages to the company.
Without any benefits or advantages, deploying technology just because so many people talk about it, might create so many problems. Also, many companies have already had their priorities, and trying to deploy every new fancy technology just doesn’t make sense at all. EVPN VXLAN is one of those technologies that can bring many advantages to businesses.
EVPN is not just Layer 2
One of the advantages of EVPN – Ethernet VPN, is although initially it was invented to solve Layer 2 problems, today it supports Layer 3 as well.
EVPN first was introduced with MPLS dataplane with RFC 7432, after that VXLAN became the most dominant dataplane option for EVPN.
Not just supporting Layer2, but also supporting Layer 3 VPN as well, making it a swiss army knife technology solution.
Using a single technology and providing both Layer 2 and Layer 3 services simplifies the technologies and the protocols that are used in the networks.
EVPN is not only a DCI technology
Although initially, EVPN was considered as a DCI- Datacenter Interconnect solution, today VPWS, Campus solutions, Layer 3 VPN multipoint, so many different purposes it is used.
Some people even consider using EVPN as a replacement for classical 2547 type of MPLS L3 VPNs.
There are many datacenter interconnect solutions, such as OTV, Fabricpath, etc, and they are usually vendor preparatory technologies.
EVPN is an Open standards-based architecture that ensures interoperability between different vendor equipment.
There are many defined Route Types, that provide different functions such as Multihoming, Aliasing, Fat Convergence, and so on. Some of these features were never been implemented with other Layer 2 VPNs or Datacenter Interconnect solutions.
EVPN not only does the job of many legacy VPN technologies but it does it better than each one of them in a one-to-one comparison. EVPN does already what VPLS and OTV do and actually, it combines them both and gets the best part of each.
EVPN for example works based on a control plane. VPLS doesn’t but OTV does.
The Control plane provides scalability and intelligence.
Last but not least, EVPN can support not only MPLS, or PBB- Provider Backbone Bridging, but as mentioned at the beginning of this post, mainly deployed with the VXLAN data plane.
VXLAN is one of the most popular data planes today.
Most datacenters don’t want to deploy MPLS in their networks but they want to keep MPLS in their WAN particularly and VXLAN in their DC. This makes EVPN VXLAN one of the best Datacenter VPN technology.
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