Arista Vxlan With Cloudvision Exchange (CVX)

CloudVision Exchange

CloudVision Exchange or CVX provides a single access point for real-time provisioning, orchestration and integration with third-party controllers. CVX aggregates and distributes operational state information across a set of EOS switches to support applications that provide network services.

So as per this lab the CVX is the device which receives all VTEP information and advertises it to all the leafs, without the need of generating interesting traffic. Which I will explain to you later when we configure VxLAN using BGP EVPN. In this lab scenario all the Leafs are connected to CVX which is sharing VTEP information with all.

The following diagram shows CVX is connected to the management port of each Leaf switch. You may also notice I also have it connected to the Spine, as I have the CVX also configured as a NTP server.

Lab Topology

For this lab we will setup 2 Spine and 6 Leafs as depicted below.

Arista%20VxLAN%20CVX.png

Here is how it looks like on CVX.

!---Under the global configuration we will configure cvx.

cvx
   no shutdown
   source-interface Loopback1
   !
   service vxlan
      no shutdown

!-- Configure a loopback address which is reachable from all the leaf switches.

Now let's check the connection status.

CVX#show cvx connections 
Switch 0c:61:2b:37:c4:7a
  Hostname: Leaf-5
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:40 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:00 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:18 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured
Switch 0c:61:2b:92:79:7c
  Hostname: Leaf-2
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:40 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:00 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:00 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured
Switch 0c:61:2b:67:a2:bf
  Hostname: Leaf-6
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:39 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:19 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:18 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured
Switch 0c:61:2b:c0:a7:ac
  Hostname: Leaf-1
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:27 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:07 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:06 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured
Switch 0c:61:2b:63:57:66
  Hostname: Leaf-4
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:40 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:00 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:01 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured
Switch 0c:61:2b:48:52:23
  Hostname: Leaf-3
  State: established
  Connection Status: active
  Connection timestamp: 0:03:33 ago
  Last heartbeat sent: 0:00:13 ago
  Last heartbeat received: 0:00:13 ago
  Out-of-band connection: Not secured
  In-band connection: Not secured

On the Leaf you will see VTEP IPs and Mac addresses are being RECEIVED which indicates this information has been propagated by CVX to all nodes. One advantage of this that I have noticed is that the VTEP information never purges and is always available which may increase efficiency. When the VTEP information is purged and interested traffic hits the source VTEP I have noticed a slight pause for about 2 secs before ping packets can go through and reach Host-2 or Host-3. There is no packet loss but this is something I have noticed in my lab environment.

Leaf-1#show vxlan address-table 
          Vxlan Mac Address Table
----------------------------------------------------------------------

VLAN  Mac Address     Type     Prt  VTEP             Moves   Last Move
----  -----------     ----     ---  ----             -----   ---------
  40  0c61.2b37.c47a  RECEIVED  Vx1  10.0.255.13      1       1 day, 3:42:55 ago
  40  0c61.2b48.5223  RECEIVED  Vx1  10.0.255.12      1       1 day, 3:42:15 ago
  40  0c61.2b63.5766  RECEIVED  Vx1  10.0.255.12      1       1 day, 3:42:07 ago
  40  0c61.2b67.a2bf  RECEIVED  Vx1  10.0.255.13      1       1 day, 3:42:49 ago
Total Remote Mac Addresses for this criterion: 4

The post ends here, the next part of the configuration is BGP EVPN which I will show in the next blog, which can be found at this link.

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