Friday, 29 August 2014

What is VXLAN Cisco ?


In legacy cisco environment we can only create 4094 Vlans as it only uses 12 bits Vlan id. If we talk about cloud infrastructure where there are many clients. 

Do we think 4094 vlan are sufficient? Answer is NO.

We certainly need a large number of vlan or similar technique to provide Layer 2 isolation. Cisco worked with vendors like VM, citrix etc. and developed a layer 2 technique known as VXLAN. It uses 24 segment id which comes out to be 16 million segments. This unique segment ID is called VXLAN network identifier(VNID).
VXLAN is a way to send Layer 2 traffic over L3 network. L3 can be shared by various other vendors and gives more flexibility from deployment prospective.

It is also known as MAC in UDP technique as it encapsulates Layer 2 frame in Layer 3 UDP packet.

Not only it divide the layer 2 network in large number of isolated network but it also enable us to use all the uplink called ECMP ( equal cost multipath) as it uses L3 routing table which is not possible is Legacy STP environment.

This technique is not available in legacy catalyst switches. Cisco nexus 9000,5672UP and 56128P are capable of VXLAN and most suitable product for large Datacenters and other cloud infrastructures.



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