It stands for Ethernet Virtual Private Network.
It is a kind of VPN solution that forwards layer 2 and layer 3 reachability information like mac-addresses and IP routes across an underlying layer 3 network.
It can be considered a replacement to older L2 VPN technologies like VPLS that lack load balancing capabilities and consume many network resources. VPLS was used as a way of extending L2 networks especially over MPLS based networks.
EVPN overcomes the drawbacks of VPLS and brings IP VPN’s advantages of traffic balancing and flexible deployment into the Ethernet. EVPN is widely used for interconnecting Layer 2 networks spanning large data centers.
EVPN allows the network to carry endpoint reachability information such as Layer 2 MAC addresses and Layer 3 IP addresses. This control plane technology uses MP-BGP for MAC and IP address endpoint distribution, where MAC addresses are treated as routes.
EVPN uses control plane instead of forwarding/data plane to share reachability information.
It unifies the control planes for various VPN services using BGP extensions to transmit Layer 2 or Layer 3 reachability information, separating the forwarding plane from the control plane.
It is heavily used with VXLAN for extending disparate L2 segments across data centers.
Network overlays are created by encapsulating traffic and tunneling it over a physical network. While VXLAN is the tunneling protocol that encapsulates Layer 2 Ethernet frames in Layer 3 UDP packets, EVPN is the mechanism to share reachability information for VXLAN.
EVPN and VXLAN work together to create highly scalable, efficient, and agile campus and data center networks.
EVPN-VXLAN allows customers to easily configure same VLANS across buildings and different sites, thus reducing operational complexity. Same VLANs can be stretched across buildings and across sites.
I hope this answered your question regarding EVPN. Let me know your thoughts about it. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments section!
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