Requirements for Ethernet VPN (EVPN)

Abstract

The widespread adoption of Ethernet L2VPN services and the advent of new applications for the technology (e.g., data center interconnect) have culminated in a new set of requirements that are not readily addressable by the current Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) solution. In particular, multihoming with all-active forwarding is not supported, and there's no existing solution to leverage Multipoint-to-Multipoint (MP2MP) Label Switched Paths (LSPs) for optimizing the delivery of multi-destination frames. Furthermore, the provisioning of VPLS, even in the context of BGP-based autodiscovery, requires network operators to specify various network parameters on top of the access configuration. This document specifies the requirements for an Ethernet VPN (EVPN) solution, which addresses the above issues.

BGP MPLS-Based Ethernet VPN

“…The following subsections discuss the relationship between broadcast domains (e.g., VLANs), Ethernet Tag IDs (e.g., VIDs), and MAC-VRFs as well as the setting of the Ethernet Tag ID, in the various EVPN BGP routes (defined in Section 8), for the different types of service interfaces described in [RFC7209].…”

“…However, the existing solution has a number of limitations when it comes to multihoming and redundancy, multicast optimization, provisioning simplicity, flow-based load balancing, and multipathing; these limitations are important considerations for Data Center (DC) deployments. [RFC7209] describes the motivation for a new solution to address these limitations. It also outlines a set of requirements that the new solution must address.…”

“…This document describes procedures for a BGP MPLS-based solution called Ethernet VPN (EVPN) to address the requirements specified in [RFC7209]. Please refer to [RFC7209] for the detailed requirements and motivation.…”

“…Please refer to [RFC7209] for the detailed requirements and motivation. EVPN requires extensions to existing IP/MPLS protocols as described in this document.…”

Provider Backbone Bridging Combined with Ethernet VPN (PBB-EVPN)

“…The requirements for PBB-EVPN include all the requirements for EVPN that were described in [RFC7209], in addition to the following:…”