On today’s episode, the Datanauts starship traverses time and space via VXLAN tunnels. VXLAN is an overlay networking technology for the data center that augments and extends traditional VLANs.

VXLAN helps data center operators support multitenancy, enables ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Pathing) to make full use of available paths, and avoids the perils of Spanning Tree. VXLAN works by adding a header to an Ethernet frame that makes it routable across an IP network.

Our guest is Lukas Krattiger, Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Lukas and the Datanauts discuss how VXLAN works, explore use cases, and examine the tradeoffs of encapsuation and de-encapsulation in software vs. hardware.

We also delve into how hosts inside a VXLAN network communicate with end points outside that network.

Show Links:

Lukas Krattiger on Twitter

Show 256 – Design & Build 6 – VXLAN Use Cases – Packet Pushers

Show 66 – VXLAN and NVGRE with Ken Duda – Packet Pushers