Troubleshooting Tool for VxLAN Bridging

Modern day data centers are geographically separated to improve service availability and performance. Tunneling technologies help stretch the layer 2 domain between remote data centers to ensure data consistency and allow movement of virtualized workloads between locations without any downtime. Amongst the available tunneling protocols, VxLAN is widely used as it is an open standard and relays unmodified layer 2 traffic over existing layer 3 domain. VxLAN communication between two hosts that are in the same subnet is referred to as VxLAN Bridging. Misconfigurations or inconsistent designs in VxLAN are rather difficult and time taking to troubleshoot considering the scale and complexity of the protocol. Hence, we came up with a tool that can perform certain redundant checks quickly, significantly narrow down the fault domain as well as perform a design check on the overall network by having central connectivity through the VTEPs. The paper attempts to identify a logical approach at troubleshooting VxLAN bridging scenarios and put it together as an easy-to-use tool to simplify the task of a network engineer. The tool was tested with devices from Arista Networks and has been successful in reducing the time taken to troubleshoot most commonly occurring issues with VxLAN Bridging where OSPF is used as the underlay routing protocol.