EVPN (RFC 7432) Explained
EVPN or Ethernet VPN is a new standard that has finally been given an RFC number. Many vendors are already working on implementing this standard since the early draft versions and even before that Juniper already used the same technology in it’s Qfabric product. RFC 7432 was previously known as: draft-ietf-l2vpn-evpn.
The day I started at Juniper I saw the power of the EVPN technology which was already released in the MX and EX9200 product lines. I enabled the first customers in my region (Netherlands) to use it in their production environment.
EVPN is initially targeted as Data Center Interconnect technology, but is now deployed within Data Center Fabric networks as well to use within a DC. In this blog I will explain why to use it, how the features work and finally which Juniper products support it.
Why?
Data Center interconnects have historically been difficult to create, because of the nature of Layer 2 traffic and the limited capabilities to control and steer the traffic. When I have to interconnect a Data Center today I have a few options that often don’t scale well or are proprietary. Some examples:
- Dark Fiber
- xWDM circuit
- L2 service from a Service Provider
- VPLS
- Continue reading
Orchestrating Docker with Machine, Swarm and Compose
Back in December, we announced our new tools for orchestrating distributed apps: Machine, Swarm, and Compose. Today the first versions of these tools are available to download. They’re not ready for production yet, but we’d really like for you to … ContinuedAnnouncing Docker Machine Beta
At DockerCon EU earlier this year, we announced Docker Machine, a tool that makes it really easy to go from “zero to Docker”. Machine creates Docker Engines on your computer, on cloud providers, and/or in your data center, and then … ContinuedScaling Docker with Swarm
We are extremely excited to announce the first beta release of Swarm, a native clustering tool for Docker. For the past two years, Docker has made the lives of millions of developers easier by making building, shipping and running applications … ContinuedAnnouncing Docker Compose
Today we’re excited to announce that Docker Compose is available for download. Docker Compose is an orchestration tool that makes spinning up multi-container applications effortless. Head to the install docs to download it. With Compose, you define your application’s components … ContinuedHP Is Buying Aruba. Who’s Next?
Sometimes all it takes is a little push. Bloomberg reported yesterday that HP is in talks to buy Aruba Networks for their wireless expertise. The deal is contingent upon some other things, and the article made sure to throw up disclaimers that it could still fall through before next week. But the people that I’ve talked to (who are not authorized to comment and wouldn’t know the official answer anyway) have all said this is a done deal. We’ll likely hear the final official confirmation on Monday afternoon, ahead of Aruba’s big conference.
R&D Through M&A
This is a shot in the arm for HP. Their Colubris-based AP lineup has been sorely lacking in current generation wireless technology, let alone next gen potential. The featured 802.11ac APs on their networking site are OEMed directly from Aruba. They’ve been hoping to play the OEM game for a while and see where the chips are going to fall. Buying Aruba gives them second place in the wireless market behind Cisco overnight. It also fixes the most glaring issue with Colubris – R&D. HP hasn’t really been developing their wireless portfolio. Some had even thought it was gone for good. This immediately Continue reading
Scaling Overlay Networks: Scale-Out Control Plane
A week or so ago I described why a properly implemented hypervisor-based overlay virtual networking data plane is not a scalability challenge; even though the performance might decrease slightly as the total number of forwarding entries grow, modern implementations easily saturate 10GE server uplinks.
Scalability of the central controller or orchestration system is a totally different can of worms. As I explained in the Scaling Overlay Networks, the only approach that avoids single failure domain and guarantees scalability is scale-out control plane architecture.