How prevalent is L2 VLAN extension in 2017?

[CSCO10662744_2]

A few years ago there were a lot of talks around making the same L2 VLAN's available between two or more datacenters.

This resulted in DCI designs & products such as OTV.

Does such requirement still exist today, now that VM hosts can now vMotion to another place w/ different IP's?

The only remaining device that would need L2 extension would be things like two ASA's in HA.

Would this still warrant building out OTV w/ expensive N7K's, while N9K's would be able to support most of the other features?

TIA

[Manish Gogna]

Hi,

I would suggest checking the 'Challenges' and 'Business Benefits' section of the following link

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-7000-series-switches/solution_overview_c22-574939.html?cachemode=refresh

HTH

Manish

[CSCO10662744_2]

Thank you for the link, but my question isn't what the challenges or benefits are, but rather if people are still doing VLAN extensions today.

Newer versions of vSphere allow you to vMotion w/ a new IP, and more and more network & server technologies allow you to form HA via layer 3 hops.

So I'm curious to know if there's still a need to extend VLAN's via OTV, EoMPLS, or VPLS, etc.

[Manish Gogna]

Hi,

From the link that is shared i want to point out the following:

"OTV is aligned with technologies like Layer 2 multipathing and TRILL to provide elastic and resilient Layer 2 domains and a coherent and well-designed feature set that supports the data center of the future. Rather than retrofitting technologies designed for carrier applications, OTV focuses on the main operational challenges and required efficiencies in the data center to provide a lean and comprehensive solution to the LAN extension challenge experienced in the data center.

OTV is the only Layer 2 extension protocol that can provide transparent multipathing integration when virtual PortChannel (vPC) or Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) technology is used at the Layer 2 sites being interconnected over an IP cloud. Since OTV is IP encapsulated, OTV also uses any multipathing available in the underlying IP core."

Additionally, OTV is much better/robust DCI solution than something like VXLAN and you can expect some feature additions to OTV in upcoming releases and is still the best DCI solution out there.

For any official word on such queries or to get details of roadmap you can always engage your Cisco Account team.

I would also love to hear more on this from our DC experts who are active on the support community.

HTH

Manish