Book Review - Building Data Centers with VXLAN BGP EVPN: A Cisco NX-OS Perspective

 

If you are completely new to EVPN, this book might help you understand the basics. But interestingly enough the book is dedicated to VxLAN BGP EVPN spread across roughly 450 pages and still miss to cover following topics in details:

- BGP underlay & Overlay designs details and tradeoffs beside best practices

- No details of EVPN route types, their encoding, flooding scope & optimization

- No details of design choices & tradeoffs 

- Lot of repetition 

- Very condensed packing of contents

- EVPN MLAG/Multi-homing details are skipped

- EVPN Policies stitching details are missing between different BGP AFIs & potential issues in ref. to policy control and information loss

- Multi-pod and Multi-fabric designs are are briefly touched  with no details but just plain theory

- EVPN over DCIs (L2 vs. L3) are very briefly touched with no details at all

- VxLAN & EVPN OAM are completely skipped

- No complete end to end configuration examples and scenarios

- Dual Stack & IPv6 only DCs are completely skipped

- Open Stack integrations are skipped

- How to deal between Physical and Virtual VTEPs is not covered

- Controller vs. Controller less designs are skipped

- Programmable fabric scalability details are not covered 

- Platforms specific details and limitations are not addressed 

- EVPN control plane security options are left for you to explore

HTH...

A Tech Artist 🎨

The Data Centre Networking (DCN) Ref. Frame - Expanding MONAF Part 1

Your Data Centre Network (DCN) essentially is a stretch that cuts across SaaS, PaaS, Public Clouds, Hybrid Clouds & the Modern Day Multi-Cloud.

If You look underneath, it's essentially a set of technical capabilities, combined together to deliver business outcomes.

But what should be Your starting point to have a well structured conversation with business as well as the technical folks around DCN ?

Well, if we expand the DCN frame under the MONAF umbrella, it exactly does that to offer You are a very detailed and a firm structure by segmenting those capabilities into well defined and structured layered approach. (Essentially following the famous MECE consulting approach).

Let me know if there is any questions that comes in your mind around DCN that this frame couldn't fit into one of it's layers.

HTH...

A Tech Artist 🎨