Data centers have moved from the enterprise to a cloud-based infrastructure, and from a physical sever being a unit of computing to a virtual machine (VM) as a unit of computing. From the VM technology has evolved the concept of cloud technology, which has virtualized the compute, networking and storage. All this technology enabled the leasing of VMs to customers for public cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft etc. The advances of the hypervisor and cloud technology by the likes of VMware, Xen, and the KVM community made this possible.

The intended audience for this white paper is familiar with networking terms and may refer to the “Network Definitions White Paper” for additional information. Next, one may also read the companion white papers titled “BGP EVPN VXLAN” and “Multi Chassis Link Aggregation with Active-Standby”. All the aforementioned documents are part of the meta paper, “BGP-EVPN-VXLAN-MC-LAG White Paper”. Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) has the following homing modes for connection between Provider Edge (PE) and Customer Edge (CE) devices: