Been there, got the t-shirt ... VXLAN was not designed to be a direct replacement for L2VPN. It was built to scale L2 broadcast domains. With Cisco, L2 control protocols like STP are not supported. Can't speak for other vendors. So what someone would typically expect from EoMPLS and L2 protocol tunneling, they're not going to get with a VXLAN substitute. If all you're looking to do is create a virtual Ethernet cable between two L3 interfaces with absolutely no L2 protocol tunneling involved, it works like a champ. We use them for that purpose, building virtual cross-connects between routers, as well as in a few virtual environments to overlay L2 networks across a BGP CLOS. I would not recommend VXLAN to replace L2VPNs unless you plan to wait for / hope for L2 protocol tunneling support. You would not get a direct replacement for your current VPLS circuits. Segment routing is in the same boat - no L2VPN support until next year, and then it's supposed to be limited to -EX and -FX Nexus chassis. I can't speak on the subject of using it across a WAN; we dump our VXLAN tunnels to ASR9Ks at the edge where traditional MPLS takes over. Generally, it's not recommended to try and extend a LAN-based protocol across a WAN. While it's L3 traffic once the VXLAN overlay takes over, I would look into the control plane requirements, overhead, etc. before even considering it. NCS is what Cisco currently recommends for a scalable MPLS fabric. There's also the ASR9000V, which acts as a satellite / remote line card of larger ASR9K routers, but you'd still want some kind of aggregation in there to scale or your ASR9K port cost is going to start to hurt. Hit me up off-list if you want to know a little more in detail. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Simon Lockhart Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2017 2:12 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: VXLAN for WAN Pseudowires? All, I'm currently going through a network design for an upgrade for one of the networks I run. Much of the wide-area traffic on the network is used purely to transport Ethernet tail circuits back from an edge PoP to a core PoP. Currently we're using Extreme X460 and X670 switches to achieve this, carrying the tail circuits within VPLS. Two things are making me look at a change of solution for this - firstly Extreme have stated that they're not interested in the service provider market any more (and reflected this in significant reductions in discounts), and secondly we need to look at higher bandwidth port options (40G + 100G, particularly for backhaul circuits). As we're primarily a Cisco house, I've been looking at suitable replacements, and the Nexus 9k range looks good - 92160YC and 9236C in particular. However, this would mean a shift from VPLS to VXLAN. We're also looking at Cisco-like products, such as the Arista range. We've been doing some testing in the lab, and so far, things look good - it's easy to configure, and appears to do the job of getting packets from A to B. We do have two concerns, though: 1) Cisco are strongly advising against using the Nexus switches in a WAN scenario - as they're designed for "datacentre" use. They've so far said they can't find anyone who can help validate designs using Nexus, and instead are pushing us towards the NCS-5000 series switches. Same chipset, but 2-3 times the price! NCS does, however, support VPLS, so would be an easier drop-in to our existing network. 2) Traffic engineering - we don't have a lot of requirement for this, but do have a small number of customers who buy A and B circuits, and require them to be routed across different paths on our network. This is easy with MPLS using explicit LSPs, but we've not yet worked out how to achieve the same thing in VXLAN. So, my question to the community is - have any of you used VXLAN as a wide-area layer 2 transport technology? Any pros or cons? Gotchas? Scare stories? Recommendations? Am I trying to shoot myself in the foot? Many thanks, Simon