BGP in Data Center Fabrics

blog » series » BGP in Data Center Fabrics

You must use BGP as the endpoint reachability routing protocol in your data center fabric if you decide to run VXLAN with EVPN control plane… but should you also run it as the transport (underlay) routing protocol instead of OSPF or IS-IS? The resources collected on this page might help you make that decision.

We covered this topic in these webinars, articles, and podcasts:

Petr Lapukhov (the author of BGP-as-better-IGP idea) initially proposed to use BGP as a data center SDN mechanism. I covered that use case in the BGP-Based SDN Solutions webinar and in these blog posts:

We also tried to answer the question “Do we need a new routing protocol for data center fabrics?” in these Software Gone Wild episodes and related blog posts (TL&DL: No):

I covered the design aspects of using BGP in data centers (in particular in combination with EVPN) in these blog posts:

It’s also popular to run BGP on redundantly connected servers, or on edge appliances connecting overlay virtual networks with physical world. More details in these blog posts and in the Routing on Servers part of Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Architectures webinar.

The designers of Cumulus Linux preferred the EBGP-only data center design, and added numerous features to their BGP routing daemon (now FRR). We covered those features in the FRRouting Architecture and Features webinar, in the Cumulus Linux part of the Data Center Fabric Architectures webinar, and in these blog posts:

Some vendors love making your life overly complex, inventing ridiculous architectures like running IBGP (EVPN) over EBGP (IP routing). Here are a few choice rants blog posts on that topic:

Two other interesting topics often pop up in BGP-related discussions: anycast and multipathing:

You might also find these blog posts somewhat relevant to your data center BGP designs:

These BGP details might help you when designing or deploying your next BGP-based network:

Finally a few more abstract blog posts to tickle your gray cells:

Sidebar