July 11, 2017
Introduction
by Pablo Narváez

This is the first post in a series where I’ll go deep on how VXLAN is deployed on Arista switches and how it operates in a Layer-3 Ethernet fabric.

Two-tier Layer-3 VXLAN Ethernet Fabric

For this lab, I will create a self-contained virtual environment with Ubuntu Linux/KVM and Arista virtual EOS (vEOS). Please note, the IP Storage, Services and Border Leafs will not be deployed yet; once we are done with VXLAN, I will add new features and functionalities including the extra Leafs.

Hardware and versions to be used in my lab:

• 2x HPE DL-360 ProLiant Gen8 server
– 2x 64bit 8-core Intel Xeon processors (E5-2650)
– 128GB RAM
– 4x 300GB SAS drives (sda, RAID 0)
– 2x 1TB SAS drivers (sdb, RAID 0)
– 1x iLO dedicated GE network port
– 4x embedded GE network ports
– 1x 10GbE dual-port network module
• Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with KVM
• VMware iESXi 6.5
• Arista vEOS 4.17.5M

I will provide detailed instructions for what to do (and configure) on every device. Equipment and operating systems versions may change along the way, so I will make appropriate notes wherever needed.

This was just an overview of the virtual lab I will be building. As stated before, I am going to follow this up with a series of articles focusing on the different infrastructure layers; as those articles are released, the links will be updated here:

• Lab Part 1: Introduction (this article)
• Lab Part 2: Virtual Environment Setup
• Lab Part 3: Configuring the Layer-3 Ethernet Fabric
• Lab Part 4: Configuring and Testing VXLAN

You can always check my github repository to download the configuration files.