Forwarding BUM Frames in VXLAN Network With Static Ingress Replication
In the last post we used multicast to forward BUM frames. In this post, static ingress replication is used which removes the requirement for multicast in the underlay. Before setting this up, let’s do a comparison of multicast vs ingress replication. To make this interesting, let’s use a larger topology consisting of 2 Spines and 32 Leafs:

Assume that all Leafs have the same VNIs. In a scenario with multicast, Leaf-1 sends for example an ARP request encapsulated in multicast towards Spine-1. This is a single frame. Spine-1 then replicates this frame and sends it on all its links towards the Leafs:

This is very efficient as a single frame is sent by Leaf-1 and then 31 copies are sent on the other links to the Leafs. If the ARP request is 110 bytes, then a total of 32 x 110 = 3520 bytes have been consumed to send this ARP request. This is optimal forwarding from a resource consumption perspective and one of the strengths of multicast. Now let’s compare that to ingress replication. With ingress replication, Leaf-1 sends 31x copies of the frame (with different destination IP) towards Spine-1. Spine-1 then forwards those frames on each link towards Continue reading