Migrating from fabricpath to EVPN/VxLAN

Introduction

Do you have a 3 tier, switched, or vendor proprietary data center design?

Does it rely on spanning tree or proprietary solutions to eliminate spanning tree?

Not sure how to migrate to a new architecture without serious downtime?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then this post is for you. We’ll be looking at deploying an EVPN/VxLAN Data Center fabric and migrating from a cisco fabricpath environment to the new design.

Although we will be focusing on a fabricpath migration many, if not all, of the principles apply to migrating a 3 tier architecture.

1. Building the new Data Center Fabric
2. Connecting the current fabricpath and new fabric
3. Migrating switched virtual interfaces
4. Migrating various types of physical devices

Building the new Data Center Fabric

The easiest part of designing and building the new fabric is the physical topology. This should be a symmetric topology to easily take advantage of equal cost multipath and add additional switches with ease. This is also known as a spine/leaf or clos topology. The basic idea is leafs connect to spines and spines connect to super spines. A leaf/spine should not connect to another switch of the same type expect for multichassis lag or virtual port-channel at the access layer if you’re utilizing this.


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ISIS as an underlay routing protocol

Next you must decide on routing protocols. We will not examine layer 2 as this will be a completely routed fabric eliminating the need for any STP in your datacenter. Remember if you’re not Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, or Google (FANG) or some other webscaler you probably don’t have FANG problems i.e. there is no need to run a BGP underlay and learn to turn all the associated knobs to make that work; nor to engage in troubleshooting complex problems like path hunting.

For this reason we will look at utilizing Intermediate System to Intermediate System (ISIS) as an underlay with Internal Border Gateway Protocol (iBGP) as an overlay.

We prefer ISIS as an underlay network for data centers because:

  • it is easier to scale than OSPF
  • is extensible from the beginning (Type Length Values for additional capabilities)
  • better stability at scale

The secondary loopback is to enable the advertisement of a virtual IP address for traffic destined to the vPC pair. Single attached or routed links will advertise the physical IP address of the leaf so traffic returns the that specific leaf and not the pair.

iBGP as the overlay

The overlay is pretty straight forward. We will run iBGP with loopback peerings to exchange EVPN routes. EVPN scales significantly better than other VxLAN control plane protocols so we will not explore flood and learn or static assignment.

We will be utilizing vPC on the access layer for the remainder of the post. There are other methods for dual attached devices such as EVPN-multihoming but as this is cisco specific for fabricpath migrations they will not be discussed.

See an example configuration below of how the VIP/PIP mentioned earlier operate

Leaf BGP and NVE

interface nve1
  no shutdown
  host-reachability protocol bgp
  advertise virtual-rmac ## for advertising the VIP 
  source-interface loopback1

router bgp 8675309
  router-id 100.127.0.4
  address-family l2vpn evpn
    advertise-pip ## for advertising PIP if single attached
  neighbor 100.127.0.0
    remote-as 8675309
    update-source loopback0
    address-family l2vpn evpn
      send-community
      send-community extended

Connecting the current fabricpath DC and new fabric

The first thing to do is decide on the physical point of interconnection. You’ll want to ensure you chose a place you have enough ports to do a dual sided vPC with enough bandwidth to cover lateral traffic between new/old until the migrations are complete.

Next we have to think about the layer 2 protocols in play. Since spanning tree isn’t in play on either side we need to take special consideration to make sure we do not introduce a layer 2 loop.

The EVPN/VxLAN side will not do anything with STP BPDUs but there is a requirement on the fabricpath side that it remains the root bridge. This is due to the entire fabricpath domain looking like one physical bridge. If a port in the fabricpath domain receives a superior BPDU a root-guard of sorts is enacted and the content edge port begins blocking.

Why do we care if STP doesn’t pass over the EVPN fabric? If the fabricpath environment is interconnected at two points then there will be a loop back to the fabricpath domain. This is a situation we want to avoid.

It can be avoided by:

  1. only having one interconnect
  2. manually pruning vlans at the two+ points of interconnect to ensure vlans remain on exactly ONE path

Migrating Switched Virtual Interfaces

Our preferred method of migrating SVIs from the old fabricpath environment to the new fabric is to:

  • build all of the new Distributed Anycast Gateways (DAG) on the new fabric
    • keep them shutdown
  • establish a L3 adjacency via BGP for routing traffic back to exit points until the migrations are complete
  • add the VLANs being migrated to the dual side vPC
  • shutdown the SVIs on the fabricpath side and no shut the DAGs on the new fabric
  • manually clear ARP on any hosts that did not update with the new DAG MAC

Migrating physical devices

Most of the physical devices are “easy” since there is no option but to physically move cables and you know this will result in a slight outage while the new uplinks come online.

However, with HA pairs of devices it is possible to migrate by moving the standby unit, waiting for the HA to reestablish, forcing a failover, move the active unit, and then “fail” back to the primary unit. This will test your HA setup as well as provide a seamless migration.

If you have new compute and storage you can migrate your workloads directly to the new environment and age out the legacy compute/storage.

Finally, ensure there are no more devices in use on your old environment and decommission the devices.

If you have questions or need assistance do not hesitate to reach out to us at ip architechs.

Cisco to MikroTik – Switching and VLANs

 

 

About the Cisco to MikroTik series

One of the most difficult configuration challenges for MikroTik equipment seems to be switching and VLANs in the CRS series. Admittedly, the revamp of VLAN configuration for MikroTik CRS switches in early 2018 made things a lot easier. But, sometimes there is still confusion on how to configure VLANs and IP addresses in VLANs with MikroTik RouterOS operating on a switch.

This will only cover VLAN configuration for CRS 3xx series switches in RouterOS as SwitchOS is not nearly as common in operational deployments.

CRS 1xx/2xx series use an older style of configuration and seem to be on the way out so I’m not 100% sure whether or not i’ll write a similar guide on that series.

If you’ve been in networking for a while, you probably started with learning the Cisco CLI. Therefore, it is helpful to compare the commands if you want to implement a network with a MikroTik and Cisco switches.

This is the fourth post in a series that creates a Rosetta stone between IOS and RouterOS. Here are some of the others:

Click here for the first article in this series – “Cisco to MikroTik BGP command translation”
Click here for the second article in this series – “Cisco to MikroTik OSPF command translation”
Click here for the third article in the series – “Cisco to MikroTik MPLS command translation”

While many commands have almost the exact same information, others are as close as possible. Since there isn’t always an exact match, sometimes you may have to run two or three commands to get the information needed.

Hardware for testing

In the last article, we began using EVE-NG instead of GNS3 to emulate both Cisco IOS and RouterOS so we could compare the different commands and ensure the translation was as close as possible. However in switching, we still have to use real hardware at least in the realm of MikroTik – Cisco has IOSvL2 images that can be used in EVE-NG for switching.

Notes on hardware bridging in the CRS series

Bridging is a very confusing topic within the realm of MikroTik equipment. It is often associated with CPU forwarding and is generally seen as something to be avoided if at all possible.

There are a few reasons for this…

1. Within routers, bridging generally does rely on the CPU for forwarding and the throughput is limited to the size of the CPU.

2. In the previous generation of CRS configuration, bridging was not the best way to configure the switch – using the port master/slave option would trigger hardware forwarding.

After MikroTik revamped the switch config for VLANs in 2018 to utilize the bridge, it more closely resembles the style of configuration for Metro Ethernet Layer 2 as well as vendors like Juniper that use the ‘bridge-domain’ style of config.

Using the bridge for hardware offload of L2 traffic

Note the Hw. Offload verification under this bridge port in the CRS317

It is important to realize that bridging in the CRS, when used for VLAN configuration is actually using the switch ASIC to forward traffic and not the CPU.

In this instance, the bridge is merely used as a familiar configuration tool to tie ports and VLANs together but does in fact allow for the forwarding of traffic in hardware at wirespeed.

Cisco to MikroTik – command translation

Cisco commandMikroTik Command
interface FastEthernet5/0/47
switchport access vlan 100
switchport mode access
end
/interface bridge port
add bridge=bridge1 interface=sfp-sfpplus1 pvid=100
interface GigabitEthernet5/0/4
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 200
switchport mode trunk
end
/interface bridge vlan
add bridge=bridge1 tagged=sfp-sfpplus1 vlan-ids=200
interface Vlan200
ip address 172.16.1.254 255.255.255.0
end
/interface vlan
add interface=bridge1 name=vlan200 vlan-id=200
/interface bridge vlan
add bridge=bridge1 tagged=sfp-sfpplus1,bridge1 vlan-ids=200
/ip address
add address=172.16.1.254/24 interface=vlan200 network=172.16.1.0
spanning-tree mode mst
/interface bridge
add fast-forward=no name=bridge1 priority=0 protocol-mode=mstp region-name=main vlan-filtering=yes
interface FastEthernet5/0/47
switchport access vlan 200
switchport mode access
spanning-tree portfast
end
interface bridge port set edge=yes-discover
interface GigabitEthernet5/0/4
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 200
switchport mode trunk
channel-group 1 mode active
end

interface Port-channel1
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 200
switchport mode trunk
end
interface bonding
add mode=802.3ad name=Po1 slaves=sfp-sfpplus1,sfp-sfpplus3 \
transmit-hash-policy=layer-2-and-3

/interface bridge vlan
add bridge=bridge1 tagged=Po1,bridge1 vlan-ids=200
show mac address-tableinterface bridge host print
show mac address-table vlan 200interface bridge host print where vid=200
show mac address-table interface Gi5/0/4interface bridge host print where interface=sfp-sfpplus1
show interfaces trunk
show vlan
interface bridge vlan print
show spanning-tree
interface bridge monitor
show etherchannel summaryinterface bonding print detail


Examples of the MikroTik RouterOS commands from the table above



Untagged switch port

This command will create an untagged or “access” switch port on VLAN 100

[[email protected]] > /interface bridge port add bridge=bridge1 interface=sfp-sfpplus1 pvid=100

Tagged switch port

This command will create a tagged or “trunk” switch port on VLAN 200. Additional VLANs can be tagged on a port by using the same syntax and adding a new VLAN number.

[[email protected]] > /interface bridge vlan add bridge=bridge1 tagged=sfp-sfpplus1 vlan-ids=200

Layer 3 VLAN Interface

Similar to a Cisco SVI (but dependent on the CPU and not an ASIC) this command will create a layer 3 interface on VLAN 200

[[email protected]] >

/interface vlan add interface=bridge1 name=vlan200 vlan-id=200
/interface bridge vlan
add bridge=bridge1 tagged=sfp-sfpplus1,bridge1 vlan-ids=200
/ip address
add address=172.16.1.254/24 interface=vlan200 network=172.16.1.0

Multiple STP

This command will set the bridge loop prevention protocol to Multiple Spanning Tree. As a general observation, MSTP tends to be the most compatible across vendors as some vendors like Cisco use a proprietary version of Rapid STP.

[[email protected]] > /interface bridge add fast-forward=no name=bridge1 priority=0 protocol-mode=mstp region-name=main vlan-filtering=yes

STP Edge port

This is referred to as “portfast” in the Cisco world and allows a port facing a device that isn’t a bridge or a switch to transition immediately to forwarding but if it detects a BPDU, it will revert to normal STP operation. (this is the difference between edge=yes and edge=yes-discover)

[a[email protected]] > /interface bridge port set edge=yes-discover

LACP Bonding

This command will create a bonding interface which is similar to a Port Channel in Cisco’s switches. Two or more physical interfaces can be selected to bond together and then the 802.3ad mode is selected which is LACP. You can also select the hashing policy and ideally it should match what the device on the other end is set for to get the best distribution of traffic and avoid interoperability issues.

[[email protected]] >
/interface bonding
add mode=802.3ad name=Po1 slaves=sfp-sfpplus1,sfp-sfpplus3 \
transmit-hash-policy=layer-2-and-3

/interface bridge vlan
add bridge=bridge1 tagged=Po1,bridge1 vlan-ids=200

View the MAC table of the switch

This print command will show all learned MAC addresses and associated VLANs in the CAM table of the switch

[[email protected]] > interface bridge host print
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid, D - dynamic, L - local, E - external 
 #       MAC-ADDRESS        VID ON-INTERFACE      BRIDGE     AGE                 
 0   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46      Po1               bridge1   
 1   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:47      sfp-sfpplus2      bridge1   
 2   D E 04:FE:7F:5C:5D:9C    1 Po1               bridge1   
 3   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46    1 Po1               bridge1   
 4   D   00:0C:42:B2:A6:3D  200 sfp-sfpplus2      bridge1    52s                 
 5   D E 4C:5E:0C:23:DF:50  200 Po1               bridge1   
 6   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46  200 bridge1           bridge1   
 7   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:47  200 sfp-sfpplus2      bridge1

View the MAC table for VLAN 200 in the switch

This print command will show all learned MAC addresses in VLAN 200.

[[email protected]] > interface bridge host print where vid=200
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid, D - dynamic, L - local, E - external 
 #       MAC-ADDRESS        VID ON-INTERFACE           BRIDGE           AGE                 
 0   D   00:0C:42:B2:A6:3D  200 sfp-sfpplus2           bridge1          51s                 
 1   D E 4C:5E:0C:23:DF:50  200 Po1                    bridge1         
 2   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46  200 bridge1                bridge1         
 3   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:47  200 sfp-sfpplus2           bridge1

View the MAC table for bonding interface Po1 in the switch

This print command will show all learned MAC addresses on port Po1.

[[email protected]] > interface bridge host print where interface=Po1         
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid, D - dynamic, L - local, E - external 
 #       MAC-ADDRESS        VID ON-INTERFACE           BRIDGE           AGE                 
 0   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46      Po1                    bridge1         
 1   D E 04:FE:7F:5C:5D:9C    1 Po1                    bridge1         
 2   DL  64:D1:54:F0:0E:46    1 Po1                    bridge1         
 3   D E 4C:5E:0C:23:DF:50  200 Po1                    bridge1

View the current VLANs configured in the switch 

The bridge vlan print command will show all configured VLANs in the switch.

[[email protected]] > interface bridge vlan print
Flags: X - disabled, D - dynamic 
 #   BRIDGE              VLAN-IDS  CURRENT-TAGGED              CURRENT-UNTAGGED             
 0   bridge1             200       bridge1                     sfp-sfpplus2                 
                                   Po1                        
 1 D bridge1             1                                     bridge1                      
                                                               Po1

View Bridge Spanning Tree information 

The bridge monitor command will show the configuration details and current state of spanning tree including the root bridge and root port

[[email protected]] >  interface bridge monitor
numbers: 0
                    state: enabled
      current-mac-address: 64:D1:54:F0:0E:46
              root-bridge: yes
           root-bridge-id: 0.64:D1:54:F0:0E:46
  regional-root-bridge-id: 0.64:D1:54:F0:0E:46
           root-path-cost: 0
                root-port: none
               port-count: 2
    designated-port-count: 2
        mst-config-digest: ac36177f50283cd4b83821d8ab26de62

LACP Bonding information

This command will show the details of the LACP configuration and whether the bonding interface is running which indicates a valid LACP neighbor.

[[email protected]] > interface bonding print detail
Flags: X - disabled, R - running 
 0  R name="Po1" mtu=1500 mac-address=64:D1:54:F0:0E:46 arp=enabled arp-timeout=auto 
      slaves=sfp-sfpplus1,sfp-sfpplus3 mode=802.3ad primary=none link-monitoring=mii 
      arp-interval=100ms arp-ip-targets="" mii-interval=100ms down-delay=0ms up-delay=0ms 
      lacp-rate=30secs transmit-hash-policy=layer-2-and-3 min-links=0