Chapter 6. Configuring and Administering Ethernet VPN

All the theory and grounding of the past chapters are put to practical use in this chapter. We study Ethernet VPN (EVPN) configuration for the three most common deployment scenarios: asymmetric centralized routing, asymmetric distributed routing, and symmetric routing. In each case, we first present the final configuration for the open source routing suite, Free Range Routing (FRR). We then dissect the configurations so that we can learn how to put them to use in other scenarios.

The configuration with FRR is radically simpler than in other routing suites but interoperates with the more complex configuration of those other suites. To help users, we provide a sample cheat sheet at the end providing an FRR configuration along with its Cisco NX-OS equivalent.

Although we’re focusing on EVPN, we also have to show the data-plane configuration because EVPN configuration reflects some of the aspects of that configuration. It includes Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF), Virtual Network Identifier (VNI), and Virtual Local-Area Network (VLAN)-to-VNI mappings. These parts are common to all networks and configuring them is vendor specific, so I limit the discussion to stating the logical pieces to configure. In some cases, I show snippets of configuration on a Debian Linux distribution. I assume use of the ifupdown2 package for network interface configuration.

It is not sufficient to configure a network. We also need to examine the running ...

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