Home > Networking Solutions > Converged and Hyperconverged Solutions > VxRail Networking Solutions > Guides > VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail Multirack Deployment Using BGP EVPN - Part 2 of 2 > BGP EVPN VXLAN overview
EVPN is a control plane for VXLAN that is used to reduce flooding in the network and resolve scalability concerns. EVPN uses multiprotocol BGP (MP-BGP) to exchange information between VXLAN tunnel endpoints (VTEPs). EVPN was introduced in RFC 7432, and RFC 8365 describes VXLAN-based EVPN.
VXLAN-based EVPN is a next-generation VPN. It is intended to replace previous generation VPNs like Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS). Some of its key features are:
The primary use cases for EVPN are:
Figure 9. BGP EVPN topology
This deployment achieves tunneling of Layer 2 overlay virtual networks through a physical Layer 3 leaf-spine underlay network using VXLAN-based EVPN to allow VxRail to communicate across four networks:
VXLAN allows a Layer 2 network to scale across the data center by overlaying an existing Layer 3 network and is described in Internet Engineering Task Force document RFC 7348. Each overlay is seen as a VXLAN segment.
Each segment is identified through a 24-bit segment ID seen as a VNI. This allows up to 16 Million VNIs, far more than the traditional 4,094 VLAN IDs that are allowed on a physical switch.
VXLAN is a tunneling scheme that encapsulates Layer 2 frames in User Datagram Protocol (UDP) segments, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10. VXLAN encapsulated frame
VXLAN encapsulation adds approximately 50 bytes of overhead to each Ethernet frame. As a result, all switches in the underlay (physical) network must be configured to support an MTU of at least 1600 bytes on all participating interfaces.
Note: In this deployment example, switch interfaces are set to their maximum supported MTU size of 9216 bytes.
VTEPs handle VXLAN encapsulation and de-encapsulation. In this implementation, the leaf switches are the VTEPs.
EVPN uses BGP to exchange endpoint MAC and IP address information between VTEPs. When a host sends a packet to an endpoint, the switch looks up the routing table for a match. If it finds a match that exists behind another VTEP, the packet is encapsulated with VXLAN and UDP headers and encapsulated again with outer IP and Ethernet headers for transport over the leaf-spine network. When the packet arrives at the destination VTEP, the outer Ethernet, IP, UDP, and VXLAN headers are removed, and the switch sends the original packet to the endpoint.