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At the physical layer of a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), the Layer 2 or Layer 3 transport services provide the switching fabric. A leaf-spine architecture using Layer 3 IP supports a scalable data network. In a Layer 3 network fabric, the physical network configuration terminates Layer 2 networks at the leaf switch pair at the top of each rack. However, VxRail management and NSX Controller instances and other virtual machines rely on VLAN-backed Layer 2 networks.

Discovery or virtual machine migration cannot be completed because the IP subnet is available only in the rack where the virtual machine resides. To resolve this challenge, a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Ethernet VPN (EVPN) is implemented. The implementation creates control plane backed tunnels between the separate IP subnets creating Layer 2 networks that span multiple racks.

Figure 1.         Illustration of stretched layer 2 segments between VxRail nodes in separate racks