VXLAN/EVPN vs VRF Lite
A little background information first.
When having a business requirement of tenancy, most solutions will tend to lean towards VRF. That is because VLANs require a distributed L2 environment, which comes with spanning tree, mlag and a whole other glut of inefficient network control plane protocols. Upleveling the infrastructure to L3 ends up requiring VRF technology to enforce tenancy.
Once you’ve settled on this feature as the solution for the business requirement, the next question is: How do I successfully deploy VRFs in a large distributed environment at scale, that also allows me to minimize the burden of management while still enforcing tenancy in all the important parts of my network? Most conversations surrounding this question will lead down two solution paths:
- VXLAN with EVPN
- VRF Lite
Definitions of VXLAN with EVPN and VRF Lite.
VXLAN with EVPN leverages VRFs at every border and leaf switch, while all the intermediate devices (ie. spines, super spines) only see the encapsulated VXLAN traffic, and hence do not need any VRF intelligence or visibility.
A VRF Lite solution is fundamentally simpler since it uses less moving parts. The thought of enabling the EVPN address family and encapsulating traffic into a VXLAN tunnel Continue reading