Recommended L2 switches for a new IXP

Tue Jan 20 08:04:29 UTC 2015

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 09:37:35PM -0500, Phil Bedard wrote:
> I think in fairly short order both TRILL and 802.1AQ will be depercated in 
> place of VXLAN and using BGP EVPN as the control plane ala Juniper 
> QFX5100/Nexus 9300. 

We also evaluated VXLAN for IXP deployment, since Trident-2 introduced HW
support for it. But VXLAN does *not* create a network for you, it relies on
some existing underlying IP network, on top of which VXLAN creates stateless
tunnels.

By using TRILL, we could connect 4 switches into a ring (or any other
reasonable topology) and have a fully functional network with shortest-path
"routing" of L2 packets.

With VXLAN, we'd need at least two additional IP routers with bunch of
40GE interfaces to perform the functions TRILL supports out of the box.

Regards,

   M.