Anycast Inside an EVPN/VXLAN Fabric with BGP Unnumbered (RFC 5549): A Hands-on Lab

Companion posts. This is the hands-on lab — real NX-OSv configs, the tests I ran, and where they broke. For the high-level summary see Anycast Inside the Data Center; for the deeper protocol write-up (overlay index, recursive resolution, why pure-IP fabrics lose per-host ECMP) see Anycast in EVPN/VXLAN Fabrics: The IPv6 Unnumbered and RFC 5549 Problem. Why Anycast is used for horizontal scaling and for better failure response. With modern orchestration and virtualization, a new instance of a service can be spawned on demand — by an engineer or by the system itself. ...

August 4, 2023 · 13 min · 2619 words · dnzydn

Anycast Inside the Data Center

Part of an anycast series. This is the high-level summary. For the hands-on NX-OS lab (configs, the RFC 5549 failure, the working EVPN solution) see Anycast Inside an EVPN/VXLAN Fabric with BGP Unnumbered (RFC 5549), and for the deeper protocol treatment see Anycast in EVPN/VXLAN Fabrics: The IPv6 Unnumbered and RFC 5549 Problem. Why Anycast services are advertised from multiple hosts into the data center. The same service prefix is originated from several places at once, which gives you multiple next hops for that service — and with it, load balancing, better failover, and scalability. ...

August 4, 2023 · 4 min · 646 words · dnzydn