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EXA32100 VXLAN Termination – To Save Your Sanity!

  • 3 min read

We’ve all been there.

As a customer, the difficulty of deciding for a product stems from the complexity of the product and the number of suppliers in the market. Often we are asked, ‘Why our company should choose Cubro network packet broker compared to an ‘X’ network packet broker?’

This is a recent story which was shared by one of our customers.

One of our service provider customers had purchased a few network packet brokers (32x100G) from a different vendor due to cost difference and wanted a specific feature – VXLAN termination. The customer was assured of this feature, and when the customer started the configuration, it also showed that the application was possible. The application is needed if you use Virtual EPC (mobile core network). Most of the existing probes cannot decode the traffic with VXLAN on it, and therefore, it is necessary to de-encapsulate the traffic before sending it to the monitoring tools.

However, the VXLAN termination feature of the ‘X’ network packet broker came with a caveat. In order to de-encapsulate VXLAN traffic is was necessary to create a single rule for each tunnel. But while creating the rule, you not only needed the VNI and specify the output, you also needed to specify the tunnel IP source and destination. Imagine creating the rules for 100 of tunnels – because this is the case in a vEPC. The life of a network engineer is as busy as it gets! The network engineers would need a lot of time to do this, whereas with EXA32100 it is a matter of one click!

With EXA32100, the only thing that needs to be done is to select “VXLAN stripping” at the interface where the VXLAN traffic is coming into the unit. As soon as this is done the unit will look automatically for VXLAN packets and strip the header. It will not care about which VNI, which outer IPs, etc. Additionally, the solution is scalable in case of new services in the network.

Using Cubro EXA32100, the customer can reduce business costs by making the team more productive. The service provider can save money because it needs to spend less on the cost of network operators. The network team can work with fewer resources and maximize asset utilization.

Learn more about VXLAN functionality: Cubro-EXA48600-EXA32100-VXLAN-1.pdf