EBGP-Only Data Center Design

In this lab exercise, you’ll build a modern layer-3-only leaf-and-spine data center fabric using EBGP as the sole routing protocol within the fabric and between the leaf (top-of-rack) switches and the servers.

Lab topology

The fabric you’ll build has these characteristics:

  • It has no VLANs. All links are point-to-point layer-3 links.
  • It supports only IPv6. Implementing a single layer-3 protocol within the data center and having multiprotocol address translation (NAT64) or proxy web servers at the data center edge is more manageable than running a dual-stack fabric.
  • Point-to-point links have only IPv6 link-local addresses.
  • The fabric uses EBGP as the only routing protocol. EBGP sessions are established between IPv6 link-local addresses.
  • The fabric uses EBGP to implement redundant server connectivity. Servers use EBGP to advertise their loopback addresses to adjacent leaf switches.

Expert

This is an expert-level challenge lab – you are on your own. Good luck and Godspeed!

Tip

This lab is still under development. Follow blog.ipspace.net or Ivan Pepelnjak on LinkedIn to find out when it will be ready.