For decades, datacentre networking has been dominated by cumbersome, monolithic, not to mention expensive solutions from manufacturers such as Cisco, HP and Arista. Their grip on the datacentre market has slowly but surely, been loosening with the growing popularity of disaggregation. This is the concept of treating your networking equipment, as one would a server; buy the hardware, then install your Operating System of choice.
Recently, I have been labbing with Cumulus Networks free ‘VX‘ OS on EVE-NG. It’s a fantastic way of becoming familiar with open standards networking using features like FRR (Free Range Routing). The other obvious use that springs to mind, especially in EVE-NG is the ability to completely replicate a real datacentre environment (assuming you’re using Cumulus to that end) and simulating the effect(s) a change may have on the live environment.
Stay tuned in the next few days for a guide on creating a lab for putting Cumulus VX through its paces. The environment will simulate two datacentres, running VXLAN over a BGP EVPN fabric/underlay.
