I recently got involved with a customer who had deployed NSX Federation between two locations, mostly for the use case of providing the same L2 networks on both locations, in other words ‘Global’ or Stretched Segments . They were witnessing performance issues and narrowed it down tot the fact that the NSX Edge Nodes were running out of capacity. Scaling up the bandwidth between locations by scaling out the NSX Edge Cluster to accommodate hundreds of Stretched Segments is totally achievable and can be capacity planned accordingly, but information how to do that is a little scattered across documentation and blog sites, so I decided to write this little blog about it.

As promised , a more detailed blog on how to configure EVPN between a VMware NSX T0 Gateway and a switch running SONIC!

As a recap, this is the topology I have built, using NSX running on a vSphere Cluster, while using GNS3 on an ESXi VM to emulate the ‘physical’ switch fabric. For more information on how I got this working, check out my previous blog here.

Since Broadcom acquired VMware, I quickly learned that Broadcom not only makes the forwarding Chip-Sets (Trident/Tomahawk/…) that run within a lot of Networking Vendor’s switches, but that it also delivers an ‘Enterprise’ version of SONIC . SONIC (Software for Open Networking In the Cloud), part of the Linux Foundation, is an open source network operating system (NOS)  based on Linux offering a full-suite of network functionality, that has been production-hardened in the data centers of some of the largest cloud-service providers, leveraging the collective strength of a large ecosystem and community. Broadcom is a premier member of the SONiC project in the Linux Foundation supporting the mission of enabling mass innovation through open source.

Hi! I’m Yves.

Based out of Belgium, and happily married to the Amazing