
Every bridging implementation must support flooding.
Controlplane mac mac#
In any case, learning MAC addresses is a control-plane functionality and does not affect the hardware resources (apart from the CPU load incurred).įinally, there’s flooding. Local MAC addresses are still gathered with the flood-and-learn mechanism. EVPN uses BGP to propagate MAC addresses, but only across the network. Traditional bridging, VXLAN (without EVPN), SPB, or TRILL use dynamic MAC learning, so there’s no control-plane difference between them. When using VXLAN, SPB, or TRILL, the core switches know the IP- or MAC addresses of edge switches, but are not aware of edge devices.In traditional bridging implementation, the core switches must know all MAC addresses of all nodes in the network.There’s a major difference in MAC table utilization on core switches: In any case, MAC tables on edge switches are not changed regardless of what forwarding mechanism you use – the edge switches still have to know the MAC addresses of all nodes attached to configured VLANs. Thanks a million!Įvery bridging implementation needs two data structures:Īn implementation might use a single MAC table or different MAC tables for unicast and multicast forwarding 1. Pete Lumbis and Dinesh Dutt helped me figure out or confirmed some of the details.
Controlplane mac software#
We’ll stay at a pretty high level because it’s impossible to get the hardware documentation for switching ASICs, and because the details always depend on the specific ASIC, software vendor’s use of ASIC resources, quality of ASIC vendor SDK… and I’m definitely not touching those cans of worms. We’ll compare the traditional bridging (using MLAG) with VXLAN-based bridging using IP multicast in the underlay, head-end replication, or EVPN control plane. In this blog post we’ll focus on pure layer-2 forwarding (aka bridging), a follow-up blog post will describe the implications of adding EVPN IP functionality. One of subscribers sent me this question after watching the EVPN Technical Deep Dive webinar:ĭo you have a writeup that compares and contrasts the hardware resource utilization when one uses flood-and-learn or BGP EVPN in a leaf-and-spine network?
