Category: Tags

EVPN

EVPN, or Ethernet Virtual Private Network, is like a smart system that helps computers and devices in a network talk to each other better. It’s like having a super-organized mail system where each computer has its own address, and EVPN makes sure messages get to the right place quickly and safely. So, it’s kind of like a traffic manager for information on a computer network, making everything run smoothly and securely.

ChatGPT trying (and failing) to explain EVPN

What Is EVPN?

Before going into the technical details, let’s start with the basics: What is EVPN, how does it work, and where can you use it?

EVPN Designs

EVPN was designed to be used in an IBGP environment on top of an IGP. With the eruption of EBGP as better IGP hype, many vendors tried to adapt EVPN to an environment running EBGP instead of OSPF. We covered some of the typical EVPN designs in these blog posts:

Other blog posts focus on various design details:

Finally, several blog posts describe various EVPN VPN topologies:

EVPN Implementation Details

There are tons of tiny little things that can go wrong when you try to deploy EVPN. I documented them as I stumbled upon them:

Troubleshooting EVPN

Beyond VXLAN

While EVPN is often used with VXLAN today, it was designed to work with the MPLS data plane, resulting in a few quirks:

Getting Your Hands Dirty

I launched a series of free and open-source VXLAN/EVPN labs in late 2025; this is how far I got:

EVPN Rants

Some vendors’ marketing engineers (or Senior Directors) can’t stand anyone telling them their implementation might be suboptimal, going to great lengths to prove to themselves they’re right, and generating beautiful fodder for rants.

Videos

You can watch numerous videos from the EVPN Technical Deep Dive webinar without an ipSpace.net account:

What Others Wrote About EVPN

add comment

SD-WAN

Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the second “software-defined” marketing attempt (after the original SDN) to dress a conglomerate of old technologies into shiny new clothes. Even Wikipedia article promotes some of the usual software-defined hype, quoting Network World claim that:

SD-WAN simplifies the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism. This concept is similar to how software-defined networking implements virtualization technology to improve data center management and operation.

Is It Real?

Want to know how real those claims are? Start the journey with this series of myth-busting blog posts:

Does SD-WAN make sense? Sure:

Need More Details?

I covered the basics of SD-WAN in Choose the Optimal VPN Service and SDN Use Cases webinars.

Pradosh Mohapatra described the basics of SD-WAN and its typical components and architectures:

Want to know more about Cisco’s SD-WAN solution (formerly known as Viptela)? Enjoy David Peñaloza Seijas’ deep dive into its architecture and implementation details:

Real-Life SD-WAN

SD-WAN sounds great, but does it work as expected? Maybe not:

Is it secure? Some products seem to be nothing more than a bunch of open-source component glued together with clueless Python code:

Some service providers want to use SD-WAN to offer managed services. Not surprisingly, some people1 don’t find that a good idea:

Then there are some technical details vendors love to gloss over:

Does it work within a public cloud? Yeah, sort of… with a few challenges:

Want Even More?

Love marketing-related rants? Here are a few:

Last, but definitely not least, you might enjoy these (more esoteric) solutions:

Blog Posts I Forgot to Categorize

  1. Including those working for said service providers or their customers ↩︎

add comment
Page 1 of 8
Sidebar