Are VXLAN tunnels initiated from servers?

[Kevin-H]

I always thought the VXLAN tunnels were established between two VTEP's on VXLAN-capable switches, such as Nexus 9K, and the servers wouldn't even know their traffic traverse through VXLAN, or regular VLAN.

Until I watched a UCS training video on Cisco Live, saying UCS VIC 1300 cards can now offload VXLAN processing, to free up the server general purpose CPU's. (Cisco Live 2017, BRKINI-2025)

Does this mean servers/endpoint hosts can also do VXLAN, as long as the OS supports it?

Why would they want to do that?

Wouldn't it complicate things for the server admins?

[Rick1776 · Accepted solution]

This solution would be a for VM to VM connectivity were the hypervisor would support VxLAN which VM and Hyper-V already do, so I'm not sure if the OS would have to support it because it would be a vmKernel level. Also sounds like a NSK like solution.

Hopefully someone from Cisco will chime in with more information.

[Rick1776]

I also found out that it's only supported on VMware.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/interfaces-modules/ucs-virtual-interface-card-1340/datasheet-c78-732517.html