Cisco: VXLAN Innovations on the Nexus OS: Part 1 of 2

Virtual Extensible LAN or VXLAN for short has been around since 2011 as an enabling technology for scaling and securing large cloud data centers. Cisco was one of VXLAN’s lead innovators and proponents and have demonstrated it with a continual stream of new features and functionality. This momentum continues with our announcement of the newest Nexus OS release NX-OS 7.0(3)I7(1), also known as the “Greensboro” release; available for the Nexus 3000 and 9000 family of switches. This release is jam-packed with NX-OS innovations in the areas of security, routing and network management, only to name a few.

The series of blogs will highlight some exciting new VXLAN-related features shipping as part of the Greensboro release. In this blog, we’ll look closely at three individual features: Tenant Routed Multicast, Centralized Route Leaking support, and Policy-Based Routing with VXLAN. In the next blog we give a closer look on VXLAN Ethernet VPN (EVPN) Multi-Site support.

Tenant Routed Multicast (TRM)

This feature brings the efficiency of multicast delivery to VXLAN overlays. It is based on standards-based next-gen control plane (ngMVPN) described in IETF RFC 6513, 6514. TRM enables the delivery of customer Layer-3 multicast traffic in a multi-tenant fabric, and this in an efficient and resilient manner. The delivery of TRM fulfills on a promise we made years ago to improve Layer-3 overlay multicast functionality in our networks. The availability of TRM leapfrogs multicast forwarding in standards-based data center fabrics using VXLAN BGP EVPN.

Read the entire article here, VXLAN Innovations on the Nexus OS: Part 1 of 2

via the fine folks at Cisco Systems.